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Gifted Reading & Author Recommendations
The following books and authors are a compilation of our favorites, student favorites and noteworthy classics; they vary greatly in subject, reading levels and vocabulary. By no means is this meant to be an all-inclusive list, but it is intended to be a source of potential books for entertainment, learning and pleasure.
Those books that are from the College Board Advanced Placement literature choices are marked with an asterisk (*). Additionally, where available, we recommend reading the Kaplan SAT Score-raising version of the unabridged books, marked with ears (^^); these offer the additional bonus of supplying SAT vocabulary and definitions for added learning.- Laurie Anderson: Fever, 1793
- Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice*
- Avi: Crispin, The Seer of Shadows, etc.
- Natalie Babbit: Tuck Everlasting, Search for Delicious, The Eyes of The Amaryllis, etc.
- Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre*
- Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights*^^
- Cassandra Clare: City of Bones
- Eoin Colfer: Artemis Fowl series
- Karen Chapman: The Marino Mission
- Agatha Christie: Any mystery book
- Susan Cooper: Green Boy
- Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage*
- Sharon Creech: Walk Two Moons, Love that Dog, Hate that Cat, The Wanderer, etc.
- James Dashner: The Maze Runner
- Charles Dickens: Great Expectations*, A Tale of Two Cities*
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes books
- Alexander Dumas: The Three Musketeers
- Allan Eckert: Incident at Hawk’s Hill
- Neil Gaiman: The Graveyard Book
- Jack Gantos: Dead End in Norvelt
- Margaret Peterson Haddix: Among the Hidden, etc.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of Seven Gables*
- Carl Hiaasen: Hoot, Flush, Scat, etc.
- Will Hobbs: The Maze, etc.
- Brian Jacques: Redwall series
- Gordon Korman: Framed, Zoobreak
- Madeline L’Engle: Wrinkle in Time, etc.
- C.S. Lewis: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series
- Lois Lowry: Silent Boy, The Willoughbys, Gossamer, The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, Number the Stars, etc.
- Gregory Maguire: Leaping Beauty
- Herman Melville: Billy Budd*, Moby Dick*
- L.M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables series
- Jenny Nimino: Charlie Bone books
- Christopher Paolini: Eragon
- Susan Patron: The Higher Power of Lucky
- Gary Paulsen: The Legend of Bass Reeves: Beingthe True and Fictional Account of the Most Valiant Marshall in the West, Hatchet, Dogsong, etc.
- James Philbrick: The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg
- Philip Pullman: The Golden Compass
- Wilson Rawls: Where the Red Fern Grows
- Rick Riordan: Heroes of Olympus/Percy Jackson series, Kane Chronicles series, etc.
- Roland Smith: Tentacles
- Veronica Roth: Divergent
- J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter series
- Pam Munoz Ryan: Echo
- Louis Sachar: Holes, Small Steps
- Aisha Saeed: Amal Unbound
- Laura Amy Schlitz: Good masters! Sweet ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village
- Gary Schmidt: The Wednesday Wars, Okay for Now
- Brian Selznick: The Invention of Hugo Cabret
- Mary Shelley: Frankenstein^^
- John Stephens: The Emerald Atlas
- Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde^^, Treasure Island, Kidnapped
- Trenton Lee Stewart: The Mysterious Benedict Society series
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels*
- J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings series
- Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,* The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,* A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, etc.
- Cynthia Voigt: Jackaroo, Homecoming, etc.
- H.G. Wells: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds^^, etc.
- Markus Zusak: The Book Thief
Poetry
- Harold Bloom: The Best Poems of the English Language*
- Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales*
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Marriner*
- Karen Hesse: Aleutian Sparrow
- T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land and Other Poems,* Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
- Robert Frost: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening*, etc.
- George Gordon, Lord Byron: Lord Byron: Poems*
- William Butler Yeats: Collected Poems*
- Emily Dickinson: Collected Poems*
- Langston Hughes: Collected Poems*
- John Keats: Collected Poems*
- Edgar Allen Poe: Selected Poems and Tales*^^
- William Shakespeare: The Sonnets*
- Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s Poetry and Prose*
- Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass*
Last Modified on August 16, 2022