Excellent Reading Resources

July 10, 2023

Dear Oakcrest Families,

As we welcome July, many of you are enjoying the pleasure of summer vacation. Preparations for family time in cottages at the beach or cabins in the mountains might include last-minute Amazon purchases or trips to the library to find the perfect books to fill the empty days. We hope you have found the required reading lists (Middle School/Upper School) for your students on OakcrestConnect, but we also hope that you encourage your daughters to find books worthy of pleasure reading. We recognize, though, that what should be a simple good—encouraging our children and teens to read for pleasure—has become increasingly difficult within our current culture.

The fight against bad books is certainly not new. C.S. Lewis criticizes the damage the “green book” will do in his Abolition of Man, Dorian Gray suffers the loss of his soul through the “yellow book” of hedonism in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous novel, and in Mary Shelley’s famous story Victor Frankenstein loses his humanity in pursuing the dark arts inspired by a dangerous book by Cornelius Agrippa.

But good books carry power, too. C.S. Lewis credits George MacDonald’s fairy tales and Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man for his journey towards Christianity. John Senior praises Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae for guiding him away from heresy and toward realism. Writer and professor Vigen Guroian spent a career awakening the moral imagination of his college students through fairy tales. He explains the importance of such an education in his book, Tending the Heart of Virtue. In our quest to guide young people in faith and morals, he says, “mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues [. . .] Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in such a way that it is attractive and stirs the imagination. A good moral education addresses both the cognitive and affective dimensions of human nature. And stories are an irreplaceable medium for this kind of moral education, by which I mean, the education of character.” Because our imagination is made of memory and experiences, living these experiences through characters in fiction, such as the characters William Bennett lists in this article, gives readers a landscape to witness the virtues in action while preparing them to live out virtue in reality.

Stories have power, and as professionals who interact with young people, we want to share some of the trends we have seen over the years concerning teens and books.

Many students are gravitating towards superficial books when they make choices in reading for pleasure. Presented with book challenges on social media outlets (e.g., Goodreads, TikTok, YouTube), teens tend to prioritize the number of books they can read quickly, not necessarily the quality. Current popular fiction that can be read easily with very little thought was written in the same way: for gratification in the moment, with little substance to fill it. More often than not, many books finding their way into teens’ hands are not only poorly written but insipid and amoral. These books, notably of the Young Adult and more recently the New Adult genres, neglect any kind of moral development or Christian anthropology.

Turning our children loose in a library or bookstore and asking a librarian or bookseller for advice no longer carries the same confidence in instilling our children with wonder and a unified goal of moral development. Instead, our children may easily stumble upon any number of Dorian’s “yellow books,” which may unfortunately come with a great number of recommendations or praise from critics and booksellers. The lines between mature adult fiction and teen reads seem to have been blurred with increasingly inappropriate material being offered to young readers. We may find that authors we have trusted in the past have now changed direction, and we can no longer entrust our children to them.

Good books support our aim as parents and educators to remind our children that they are made in God’s image and are destined to be with Him forever. We want books for our children that help in this aim, instilling wonder, revealing truth, and emphasizing the beautiful. This calls for vigilance in not only seeking “clean” books (books that avoid coarse language for the sake of it, or disturbing imagery and pornography, discussed at length in this article by Meghan Cox Gurdon) but books that fill a young person’s moral imagination with admirable heroes and lessons learned. Sage advice, ethical candor, courage, faithfulness, kindness and compassion-filled books wrought with adventure or providing a window into a complex interior life fulfill readers in a way incomparable to a disposable, empty book devoid of meaning. A good book brings the joy of seeking truth to the reader which forms her (good) taste.

While seemingly harmless, students who read empty books for pleasure stunt their development (both writing skills and moral development) and will not gain the stamina to read good books, much less the great ones.

It doesn’t take long to determine the worth of a book of an author you are unfamiliar with. A quick skim through the pages, looking up the author and paying special attention to the subject taglines, and having a conversation with your child can often reassure you.

Encourage your child to slow down her reading. Challenge her to keep up a reading streak of a certain number of days in a row, not a certain number of books in a year. Offer her better books to intersperse within her to - read pile and stagger her too-quick reading. Maybe start alternating her picks (approved by you) with one of your picks. Develop a lending library with other families. Your involvement makes the biggest difference in guiding your child’s moral literacy.

Let us find comfort in the power of a good book; drown the evil in an abundance of godliness. Reading books as a family, listening to audiobooks during family car trips, initiating a mother-daughter book club, sharing titles and building a library for a culture of good books with other parents whose judgment you trust are some ways to inundate our children with good reading habits and, awakening what Joseph Pearce calls in Twelve Great Books, an “enchantment of reality,” a recognition of the delight that accompanies sanctity.

There is help out there, although it can be hard to find and requires some weeding of our own.

Some resources which are available are listed here:

Enrichment lists on OakcrestConnect
A Mother’s List of Books (Theresa Fagan)
redeemedreader.com - book reviews from a Christian perspective
Common Sense Media - book reviews you can filter by age and content limits.
thebooknanny.com - detailed reviews with instances of profanity, violence, and adult content
delibris.org - an initiative supported by the Midwest Theological Forum that provides reading lists and book reviews