Love Twilight? Gothic romances have got your name written all over them! There are so many classic books that are perfect reads for teenagers, but a lot of them look unfortunately boring or daunting. Read this list and venture outside the YA bubble.
Go to a typical bookstore and have a look at the children's classics area. More often than not, there won't be much more than a few babyish fairy tales, maybe some Austen and a Dumas squeezed in.
But you shouldn't be afraid of venturing into the "adult" classics fiction; yes it may be stuffy-looking and the covers can be ugly, but there is a lot of fun, romance and sword-waggling to be had in classics. And think about it: a lot of the books you love and re-read were written thanks to the inspiration found in some of these books.
Don't let school reading put you off trying these fantastic authors:
If you like Skulduggery Pleasant, Andy Lane or the Rangers Apprentice series…
… give these classic adventure stories a go!
If you love fast-paced stories with a bit of mystery – like Skulduggery Pleasant or the Young Sherlock Holmes series – try the Sherlock Holmes books by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, or The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy. The language may be classic, but there are jokes, romances and action bursting from the margins of all these.
Younger readers on the young adult scale would enjoy the childhood misadventures in Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, or the Hardy Boys mysteries, which remain delightfully cheesy and fun to read.
If we get fairly loose with our definition of "classic", all adventurous pre-teens should try the Redwall series by Brian Jacques or anything by Tamora Pierce. Talking animals and swords make everything good.
Younger readers on the young adult scale would enjoy the childhood misadventures in Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, or the Hardy Boys mysteries, which remain delightfully cheesy and fun to read.
If we get fairly loose with our definition of "classic", all adventurous pre-teens should try the Redwall series by Brian Jacques or anything by Tamora Pierce. Talking animals and swords make everything good.
If you like Suzanne Collins, Ally Condie, Michael Grant or Veronica Roth… … try some of the original, ground-breaking dystopian adventures.
You liked the Hunger Games, Matched, Divergent and Delirium. Where to go from there? Dystopian fiction is actually going through a resurgence right now: there are a lot of classics like 1984 by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which all deal with ideas like individual freedom and mass media.
A lesser known book, like Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K Dick is a mind-bendingly good time, about a celebrity who wakes up in a parallel world where he has never existed. While not strictly dystopian, Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest is a great end-of-the-world tale that focuses on one person's attempts to survive.
If you like the Twilight series, Lauren Oliver, Lauren Kate or Cassandra Clare…
…you need to read the classic gothic romances. ALL OF THEM.
So, you're a dramatic romantic. The more angsty and drawn out the romance, the better. I totally agree. If you replace "difference in class" with "difference in species", there are quite a few similarities between the romances of old and all the werewolf-vampire-zombies falling for teenage girls now.
For starters, Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre is a bit of vampire. He's aloof, he's charming, he's strapping in a frilly collar. Jane and Mr Rochester are very will-they-won't-they, which is charming and infuriating all at once: the best kind of romance.
And you can't go past Wuthering Heights. Yes, the start can be a slog but the last two thirds are stonkingly good. Packed full of wistful sighing and wandering on moors (if Bella had a handy moor she would have definitely stumbled about miserably on it).
For more traditional romances, Cheri by Collette is another beautiful, doomed romance, between an older French woman and a young man. I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith is an excellent which-man-to-choose tale, as is A Room With a View by E.M Forster.
If you like Neil Gaiman, Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Diana Wynne Jones or Philip Pullman…… you should try some epic fantasy or gothic tales!
You'll find, when browsing in a library or a bookstore, that a lot of the classic fantasy books aren't with the rest of the classic fiction but are found in the regular science-fiction and fantasy sections. It's fairly common because there are not many fantasy books written before the 1950s – most books earlier than that veer into gothic fiction.
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, The Earthsea Quartet by Ursula Le Guin and The Mistborn Saga by Brandon Sanderson are great examples of good, character-driven fantasy.
The gothic classics are great for Gaiman fans; they have the same slight twists of reality that make the fantasy elements all the more eerie and bizarre. The books of GK Chesterton and HP Lovecraft are good choices. Edgar Allan Poe isn't for everyone, but can actually be more enjoyable when read aloud (give it a go, preferably in a booming voice).
For something scarier, read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James – with the lights on.
If you like Robert Muchamore, Anthony Horowitz, Lauren St John or Charlie Higson…… you need some spy classics in your life.
Biggles by WE Johns is both a fun series and an excellent pseudo-swear word (You can get away with "Oh, Biggles!" in front of your nan). Biggles is a British war hero with a penchant for beating up Nazis and being a gentleman. While "of their time" (read: a bit racist), they are fun, single afternoon reads. Ian Fleming's James Bond books are good, short fun too.
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan is about a man forced into going on the run during the start of World War One. It's an unfailingly exciting book and will keep you reading feverishly to the end.
Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene is also a fun, fast-paced espionage novel, with a British vacuum cleaner salesman drawn into spying on Cuba for MI6. It's quite funny and has a lot of twists to keep you interested.
Dashiel Hammett's private detective books are packed full of twists and back-stabbing: Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon are his most famous. His character Sam Spade is the original private eye character, so a lot of the quiet, heart-of-gold spies you like are probably based on him.
