Classics That 8- to 12-Year-Olds Say Are Worth Reading Today

These books all come highly recommended by the Greatess review team. Grab them for your young readers today.

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

You know the story — a mischievous boy who never wants to grow up has adventures with pirates, fairies, lost boys, and the Darling family.

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg,

Claudia and her brother Jamie run away from their suburban home in Connecticut to New York City to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They become obsessed with solving an art history mystery and being part of an even bigger adventure than they expected.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

This book provides an even more complex look at Dorothy’s journey to find home and the friends she meets along the way.

The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss

The Swiss Family Robinson survives a shipwreck and finds themselves stranded on a tropical island with nothing but their ship of supplies, survival skills, and sense of humor. Adventures abound for this family as they deal with the dangers of island life.

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, illustrated by Louis Slobodkin

This 1945 Newbery Honor book shares Wanda’s story. This girl wears the same faded dress every day but tells everyone she has a hundred dresses at home.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Even though it is a long book, it is full of action, mutiny, adventure, and loot. This fast-paced story also reveals profound lessons about the human spirit through legendary characters like Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver.

For plenty more great classic reads and reviews, check out Greatess.

The Many Boasts of Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was, without a doubt, one of the most important and influential authors of the 20th century, but he was also a very boastful man. Although many are unconfirmed or simply unverifiable, here are some of the many boasts Hemingway made throughout his storied life.

He befriended a bear. In a 1950 interview published in The New Yorker, Hemingway told staff writer Lillian Ross of a somewhat special relationship he had with a bear. Ross writes: "In Montana, once, he lived with a bear, and the bear slept with him, got drunk with him, and was a close friend."

F. Scott Fitzgerald once asked Hemingway for help of an intimate nature. The Great Gatsby author was concerned about the size of… a part of his anatomy. Hemingway asked the author to follow him to the men’s room and upon inspection said (from A Moveable Feast): "'You're perfectly fine,' I said. 'You are OK. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'"

He would finish the bar fights that James Joyce started. From Kenneth Schuyler Lynn’s book entitled Hemingway: "We would go out for a drink," Hemingway told a reporter for Time magazine in the midfifties, "and Joyce would fall into a fight. He couldn't even see the man so he'd say: 'Deal with him, Hemingway! Deal with him!'"

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Interesting Stories Surrounding Some of the Classics

There’s no shortage of interesting and intriguing stories from the literary world, here are three interesting stories about some of our best loved books and authors.

Could you point it out on a map? Bram Stoker’s Dracula set the standard when it comes to the interpretation of the modern vampire. Although partially set in Transylvania, a mountainous region in central Romania, Stoker, an Irish author, had never in fact visited Romania or any other part of Eastern Europe.

An interesting interpretation. Written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the original version of Beauty and the Beast was published 1740 in La Jeune Américaine et les contes marins (The Young American and Marine Tales). While Disney may have turned it into a magical tale of finding beauty and true love in the most unexpected of places, it was in fact written in order to encourage girls to accept arranged marriages, or as children’s literature academic Maria Tatar puts it, to accept “an alliance that required effacing their own desires and submitting to the will of a monster.”

Dahl, Roald Dahl. Before his career as the author of such beloved children’s books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl served as a spy for the British Security Coordination during World War II. Somewhat of a James Bond-esque agent, Dahl gathered intelligence for the British while using his charm to seduce society ladies, possibly for his own leisure.

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