Book Lists for Young Lutherans: High Schoolers

Whether children are homeschooled or attend a public, private or Lutheran school, one great way to “train them in the way they should go” is to encourage them to read, and read with them, at home. While Bible and catechetical reading is crucial, reading books of many genres with your children is also beneficial. As you read alongside them, you can reflect on the material with them, helping them learn how to evaluate and what to love, whom to admire and what to condemn.

To aid you in this, Kate Deddens and Leah Bromen of Classical Consultants have generously shared their list of good reads for students of various age levels. Read below their recommendations for high schoolers. (You can also check out their lists for little children and older children).

Note: Children mature at different rates and have different sensitivities, and certain families may find different sorts of content objectionable. Websites like Common Sense Media are helpful resources to ensure that the language and content of particular books are appropriate for your children.

Recommended Reading for High Schoolers

Church History, Theology & Apologetics

The Abolition of Man — C.S. Lewis

The Apocrypha (CPH edition)

The Bondage of the Will — Martin Luther

The Book of Concord

Born Again — Charles W. Colson

Church History — Eusebius

The City of God — Augustine

Complete Works (Selections) — Josephus

Confessions — Augustine

The Consolation of Philosophy — Boethius

Ecclesiastical History of the English People — Bede

The Fire and the Staff — Klemet I. Preus

The Four Loves — C.S. Lewis

The Imitation of Christ — Thomas a Kempis

Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

On the Incarnation — Athanasius

Orthodoxy — G.K. Chesterton

The Screwtape Letters — C.S. Lewis

The Spirituality of the Cross — Gene Veith

Summa Theologica (Selections) — Thomas Aquinas

Through Gates of Splendor — Elisabeth Elliot

The Weight of Glory — C.S. Lewis

Philosophy

The Best Things in Life — Peter Kreeft

Gorgias — Plato

Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

Meno — Plato

Pensées — Blaise Pascal

The Prince — Niccolo Machiavelli

The Republic — Plato

Rhetoric — Aristotle

Rights of Man/Common Sense — Thomas Paine

The Social Contract — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Two Treatises of Government — John Locke

Utopia — Thomas More

Literature

1984 — George Orwell

Animal Farm — George Orwell

Beowulf — Anonymous

Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories — Herman Melville

Brave New World — Aldous Huxley

The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Call of the Wild — Jack London

The Chosen — Chaim Potok

The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas

Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield — Charles Dickens

The Death of Ivan Ilyich — Leo Tolstoy

Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes

Emma — Jane Austen

Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury

Favorite Father Brown Stories — G. K. Chesterton

Frankenstein — Mary Shelley

Gilgamesh — Anonymous

The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift

Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte

Kristin Lavransdatter — Sigrid Undset

Les Misérables — Victor Hugo

Lord Peter Wimsey series — Dorothy L. Sayers

Moby Dick — Herman Melville

My Name is Asher Lev — Chaim Potok

The Nine Tailors — Dorothy L. Sayers

The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway

A Passage to India — E.M. Forster

The Pit and the Pendulum — Edgar Allan Poe

Persuasion — Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen

Space Trilogy — C.S. Lewis

Starship Troopers — Robert A. Heinlein

Till We Have Faces — C.S. Lewis

To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee

The Pilgrim’s Progress — John Bunyan

The War of the Worlds — H.G. Wells

Poetry

The Aeneid — Virgil

The Canterbury Tales (Selections) — Geoffrey Chaucer

The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri

The Faerie Queene — Edmund Spenser

The Iliad and The Odyssey — Homer

The Metamorphoses (Selections) — Ovid

Paradise Lost — John Milton

Thirty Poems to Memorize (Before It’s Too Late) — David Kern

Poets: Berry, Blake, Bradstreet, Browning, Byron, Carroll, Crashaw, Dickinson, Donne, Dunbar, Eliot, Frost, Herrick, Herbert, Hughes, Jonson, Keats, Kipling, Longfellow, Milton, Poe, Rosetti, Shakespeare, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, Whitman, Wilde, Wordsworth, etc.

Drama

The Bacchae — Euripides

Death of a Salesman — Arthur Miller

The Oresteia — Aeschylus

Shakespeare — as many as possible

Theban Trilogy — Sophocles

Historical Fiction & History

American Documents: Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Constitution

Winston Churchill, Selected Speeches

Code of Hammurabi

Code of Justinian

Cry, the Beloved Country — Alan Paton

Le Morte d’Arthur— Thomas Malory

Democracy in America (Selections) — Alexis de Tocqueville

The Discoverers — Daniel J. Boorstin

Federalist Papers (Selections) — Alexander Hamilton et al.

Histories (Selections) — Herodotus

History of the Franks — Gregory of Tours

History of Rome (Selections) — Livy

Ivanhoe — Walter Scott

The Law — Bastiat

Abraham Lincoln, Selected Speeches

Magna Carta

The Mayflower Compact

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass —Frederick Douglass

History of Plymouth Plantation — William Bradford

Peloponnesian War (Selections) — Thucydides

The Red Badge of Courage — Stephen Crane

Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (Selections) — Plutarch

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — Anonymous

The Song of Roland — Anonymous

Two Lives of Charlemagne — Einhard and Notker the Stammerer

Up from Slavery — Booker T. Washington

Mathematics & Science

Elements — Euclid

It’s a Numberful World — Eddie Woo

How to Solve It — George Polya

Logic

Socratic Logic —Peter Kreeft

Art

Saving Leonardo — Nancy Pearcey

State of the Arts — Gene Veith

The Annotated Mona Lisa — Carol Strickland

Music

The Gift of Music — Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson

Image: “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza at a Crossroads,” Wilhelm Marstrand, c. 1847.