The Adventure Years

A wealthy girl loses everything and must learn whether her dignity was real. Burnett's best.

A southern Illinois family during the Civil War. Brothers on both sides.

A minstrel's son in thirteenth-century England searches for his father and his lost dog.

A red-haired orphan arrives on Prince Edward Island. The first of eight books; read at least three.

A tomboy on the 1860s Wisconsin frontier. Newbery winner, based on the author's grandmother.

Nathaniel Bowditch, the self-taught navigator who rewrote how ships cross oceans.

A plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness with one boy aboard. The modern wilderness survival classic.

A Swiss orphan and her grandfather in the Alps. The original mountain childhood story.

A Native girl survives alone for years on a California island. Based on a true story.

A silversmith's apprentice in revolutionary Boston. The best children's novel about the American Revolution.

A Scottish boy on the run through the Highlands after the Jacobite uprising.

The Lewis-circle retelling of the Arthurian cycle, written for children but not condescending.

Continue the series after Big Woods and Farmer Boy. The whole arc is one of the great American family chronicles.

A New York boy runs away to live in a hollow tree in the Catskills. The thoughtful wilderness book.

A series of mid-century narrative biographies of saints, reprinted by Ignatius. Joan of Arc, More, Damien of Molokai, and dozens more.

Whitewashing the fence, the cave, the funeral. The American boyhood novel.

A dog stolen from a California ranch ends up pulling sleds in the Yukon. Short, intense, formative.

A medieval English boy who loses the use of his legs finds another path. Newbery Medal.

Bilbo Baggins, a dragon, and the beginning of Middle-earth. The gateway to Tolkien.

Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo. The original short stories, not the Disney film.

Pyle's late-Victorian retelling is the canonical version for children.

An orphan, a locked garden, and a sickly cousin. The Yorkshire-moors childhood classic.

A colonial boy left alone in the Maine woods is befriended by a Penobscot boy.

Long John Silver, the black spot, the parrot. The original pirate novel and still the best.

A boy, two coonhounds, and the Ozarks. Prepare for tears.

The Call of the Wild told in reverse: a wild wolf-dog tamed by the right human.

Seven books, the first read around ten, the last finished closer to fourteen. A boy raised by indifferent relatives discovers he is a wizard and finds, in a Scottish boarding school, both his friends and his vocation. The early volumes are warm and funny; the later ones are about loyalty, sacrifice, and the cost of standing against a real evil.

Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby; Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, the briar patch. The trickster cycle carried out of West African Anansi tradition by enslaved Africans in the American South and collected by Harris in the 1880s. Harris's dialect framing has aged badly; read Julius Lester's retellings (The Tales of Uncle Remus, 1987) for a child of ten.

Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged hut. Vasilisa the Beautiful. The Firebird. The Frog Princess. Afanasyev's collection is the canonical source; Post Wheeler's English versions or the Pantheon volume work for a child of ten. Stranger and harsher than the Grimm tales, and just as essential.

St. George and the dragon. St. Francis preaching to the birds. St. Christopher carrying the Christ-child across the river. St. Nicholas and the three sisters. The folk-religious tradition of the medieval West, ordered by the liturgical calendar. The Golden Legend is the source compendium; for a child of ten, start with Tomie dePaola's saint books or Ethel Pochocki's Once Upon a Time Saints.

Scheherazade telling stories to save her own life, night after night for a thousand and one nights. Aladdin and the lamp; Ali Baba and the forty thieves; Sinbad's seven voyages. The frame-tale form that shaped a thousand later books from Boccaccio to Borges. For a child of ten, Andrew Lang's Arabian Nights Entertainments or Geraldine McCaughrean's One Thousand and One Arabian Nights; for adults, Husain Haddawy's translation from the earliest manuscripts.

Connla and the Fairy Maiden. The horned women. Jack and his comrades. The shepherd of Myddvai. Irish, Scottish, and Welsh tales drawn from oral tradition — banshees, the Sidhe, selkies, and the everyday traffic with the otherworld that the Celtic countries took for granted. Jacobs's two volumes (Celtic Fairy Tales, More Celtic Fairy Tales) are the standard children's collection. For older readers, Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888).

The Megan Follows miniseries. Treat it like a film and watch the first two; ignore later sequels.

"Houston, we have a problem." American competence under pressure.

A floating city, sky pirates, two children. Miyazaki's most rousing adventure film.

A young woman cursed with old age and a wizard with a fire demon. Visually astonishing.

The American film about whether one life matters. Required Christmas viewing.

A young Elizabeth Taylor and a horse running the Grand National. Earnest and beautiful.

A West Virginia coal miner's son builds rockets in 1957. True story, beautifully told.

A boy spends the summer with two eccentric great-uncles in Texas. About what it means to be a man.

The transition from silent film to talkies, as a comedy. The greatest movie musical.

A girl trapped in a bathhouse for spirits must rescue her parents. Miyazaki's masterpiece.

The film adaptation of Tolkien's trilogy. Older end of this range, with parental preview for battle scenes.

A boy moves to a new neighborhood and learns baseball from the kids on the lot. The American boyhood film of its decade.

Black-and-white Kansas, Technicolor Oz. The American fairy tale on film.

Eight films across a decade. Watch each only after the corresponding book has been read; the books and the films are different works, and a child who sees the film first will rarely return to the page. Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban is the artistic high point of the series.

A Carmelite hermit walks viewers through the whole arc of Western painting in ten episodes. Idiosyncratic, warm, theologically attentive — the best art-history entry point for a child of ten.

Shackleton's 1914 expedition, the ship crushed by pack ice, the 800-mile open-boat journey to South Georgia. Frank Hurley's surviving photographs and film footage do most of the work.

Six episodes on the American national-parks idea, from Yellowstone forward. About John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and the men and women who fought to keep these places intact.

Layers of phyllo, nuts, butter, honey or syrup. Greek, Turkish, Arab — every version is good.

A real flaky biscuit from scratch. Cold butter, light hands, no twisting the cutter.

Whole hog or shoulder, vinegar sauce in eastern North Carolina or mustard in South Carolina. Regional and serious.

In a cast-iron skillet, ideally with bacon fat. Northern sugary cornbread is a separate dish.

Sweet with butter and sugar, or savory with ham and cheese. Master the pan first, then the flip.

A real all-butter croissant from a real bakery. The crumb structure tells you everything.

Caramelized onions, beef stock, Gruyère melted over a toasted baguette slice.

Denser and less cold than ice cream. Pistachio and stracciatella are good measures of a gelateria.

Stone-ground if possible, cooked slowly with butter, cheese, salt. The southern foundation.

Dry-cured Spanish ham, ideally Ibérico, sliced paper-thin.

Real Italian lasagna with bechamel, not the American ricotta version. Both are good; know the difference.

Cream-based, with potatoes and salt pork. Not the Manhattan tomato version.

The Valencian rice dish. The socarrat, the crust on the bottom of the pan, is the point.

Beef, pork, milk, white wine, tomato. Cooked for hours. Tossed with fresh tagliatelle, not spaghetti.

The British Sunday lunch. The pudding rises in the pan with the beef drippings.

A pot roast marinated for days in vinegar and spices. Sweet-sour, deeply traditional.

Pounded veal or pork, breaded and fried, with lemon. Crisp, light, golden.

Ground lamb under mashed potato. With beef it is technically cottage pie.

Keep a starter. The bread becomes a weekly habit and a useful patience exercise.

Grilled meat on skewers with pita, tomato, onion, tzatziki.

Paper-thin pastry wrapped around apples or cheese. The Austrian Sunday afternoon.

Smoked low and slow with salt and pepper bark. Central Texas barbecue is its own American art form.

The full meal: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry, sweet potato, pie. The American secular liturgy.

A potato and egg cake, served at room temperature. The Spanish national tapa.

Strained yogurt, cucumber, garlic, dill. Made well it is essential; made badly it is glue.

A children's or family concert is ideal at this age. Real orchestral sound in a real hall.

Stand at the rim or in the valley floor. The American landscape at its anchor sites.

Three generations at one table for several hours. The basic Western social unit.

Watch real work being done by people who do it well.

Walk the ground at Lexington, Concord, Yorktown, Gettysburg, Antietam, or Vicksburg. The terrain teaches what books cannot.

The Allegretto second movement is the famous one, but the whole symphony is rhythmic propulsion.

The defining American classical sound. Wide open, optimistic, and unmistakable.

At Folsom Prison, At San Quentin, and the late American Recordings sessions with Rick Rubin.

The Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, then the later vocal-and-trumpet albums. The man who invented twentieth-century music.

Symphonies 40 and 41, the piano concertos 20 and 21, the clarinet concerto.

The peak of Renaissance polyphony. The Tallis Scholars recording is the place to start.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone, We Shall Overcome, Turn Turn Turn.

Forty independent voices. The Tallis Scholars or The Sixteen.

This Land Is Your Land and the Dust Bowl Ballads.

The peak of French High Gothic. The labyrinth, the stained glass, the proportions.

Florence, painted in the cells of a Dominican monastery. Quiet, prayerful, beautiful.

Padua, c. 1305. The beginning of the Western pictorial tradition as we know it.

Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt. The American landscape as moral inheritance.

The David in Florence and the Pietà in St. Peter's. The two most famous Western sculptures.

Damaged by fire in 2019, reopened in 2024. The heart of medieval Paris.