I have been asked by several friends and family to recommend books that high school and college age men might enjoy reading. As a group, they are famous non-readers. If a college man tells his family that he’s going to take an English literature elective he’s probably going to be told to learn more about computer technology or some useful business specialty—after all, that’s why his parents are spending $60,000 a year.
I understand that this attitude prevails, but I think it’s terrible. College students today spend less than half the time doing homework than was being done in the 1960s. What percentage of college graduates today major in science—physics, biology, chemistry, or astronomy? What percentage major in mathematics? Ready? In all these sciences, 1.5 percent; in math, 1.1 percent.
What students major in today are vocational fields like business, communications, economics, finance, or psychology. Sadly, the career pressures and anxieties of adulthood have been pushed into childhood. Learning as such, learning which might be fun, is disappearing.
Reading is a good habit. So here are a bunch of books—mostly fiction, a few journalistic—that are brilliantly written, exciting, and short—less than 200 pages. They are also inclined to present a positive, hopeful view of life. Everyone striking out into adulthood needs this. Not just boys.
For many kids, that’s a lot more reading than they are doing now—we can’t get started with Brothers Karamazov or Don Quixote.
Here are eleven manageable suggestions for young male readers, but of course plenty of female readers will like them too.
- Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol (1843), 106 pages
Fezziwig alone would make this celebration of family, mutual affection, irrepressible happiness, and good cheer worth reading. The fable, with its ghosts, conversions, Christmas cheer, and happy endings may be Dickens’ sweetest, most perfect tale, written at a time in his life when he could still recall the loveable eccentrics of Pickwick Papers (1836).
We read Dickens to appreciate the blessings of family and the best of family life, but the souring of a young man—Scrooge—misled by the careerist conventions of the time, remains a challenge today. Scrooge is too-early seduced by the adult problems of getting ahead, too quick to abandon the love and idealism of youth. This is a tale of redemption, told brilliantly by perhaps our best prose writer ever.
- Catcher in the Rye (1951) 192 pages
Adolescence in America is serious. It is complicated and every boy passes through it. Holden Caulfield is one of American fiction’s most memorable characters—far from perfect, youthful but clear headed, and real, perhaps rivaled only by Huck Finn. He is himself a child full of anguish and confusion and he knows it. He is also idealistic, an otherwise normal teenager temporarily disturbed. At sixteen he is being expelled from his fourth prep school.
Fables of innocence are a recurrent element of American fiction—Jay Gatsby and Nick Carroway: Holden is younger but equally intense.
- Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963) 126 pages
If you didn’t realize that Jimmy Breslin was a great writer, this will be a most pleasant surprise. He is tirelessly funny and sympathetic with what was probably the worst team in the history of major league baseball. But the Met’s players were never discouraged, always hopeful, forgiving of one another, and passionately adored by their fans.
How is this possible in a demanding, seemingly humorless city like New York? The Mets won only 40 games, losing 120. After losing their first nine games they piled up losing streaks of eleven games, thirteen games, and beginning in May, seventeen straight games. One of their most reliable starting pitchers, Craig Anderson, lost nineteen games in a row. But people kept coming to the park.
The Mets manager, Casey Stengle, had won five consecutive world series with the New York Yankees (1949-1953) and was now seventy. He was a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame. What did he need all this for? When he accepted the job he told the press, “It’s a great honor to be joining the Knickerbockers.”
Attendance at home for the year was just short of one million. Go figure.
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 109 pages
Hemingway’s reputation and explosive, self-destructive character can easily overwhelm our interest in his writing, which was extraordinarily good. His style was beautifully simple. Hemingway’s recurring theme was about manhood—how a man may meet his death in a world stripped of all values except that of intensity.
Critics who don’t like this particular story, written late in his life, usually object to its almost satisfactory ending. In this tale a pious, old Santiago (Saint James), a fisherman by trade, rows out alone into the mile-deep Gulf Stream and hooks a gigantic marlin two feet longer than his skiff. For two days and two nights the fish pulls his boat far to the north and east while Santiago hangs on for dear life, fighting a battle of endurance. On the third day he succeeds in killing the fish with his harpoon, but now he has to get his boat home. One by one, and then two by two, the sharks move in. He arrives home with nothing by the skeleton, the bony head, and the proud sail-like tail.
He forms a special friendship back on shore with a young boy, Manolo, who admires him. Like many of us, Santiago is undefeated only because he has gone on trying.
- The Bridge (1964) 196 pages
Much of America has been built on the genius of immigrants and outsiders. Consider: Hungarian-born Andy Grove of Intel, the Canadian Alexander Schure and the creator of Pixar, Elon Musk from South Africa, or the Chinese-American construction workers who completed the transcontinental railway.
Now add to this list the Mohawk native Americans from Canada who worked at death-defying heights in all sorts of weather and using heavy equipment to complete the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, 228 feet high and more than two and one half miles long, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island. It is the longest suspension bridge in the United States and the sixth largest in the world.
Some men died in this effort, and the men do this work with a justifiable sense of pride bound together in a very special way.
A construction project of this size necessarily involved endless political maneuvers, created substantial relocations, provided hundreds of high-paying jobs, opened up new routes from New Jersey to Long Island, and changed the demographics of the area for good.
We read this book with a sense of awe. It is not fiction, it is fact.
- Cannery Row (1945) 170 pages
I never much cared for Of Mice and Men and I could not finish The Grapes of Wrath, but this short novel is something different—something absurdly funny, touching, an uplifting celebration of human values among those who appear to live at the absolute bottom of society. Here John Steinbeck celebrates the value of intangibles because that is all these people really have. Lee Chong, the wily but humane owner of the only grocery store that will do business with the inhabitants, provides everything else—fishing equipment, tobacco, fish meal, a silk kimono, pork chops, liquor, and cheap cigars. Everyone in Cannery Row owes him money.
The neighborhood is just a few blocks long, anchored by a cannery which takes in raw fish and fills hundreds of cans of sardines every day. Mack and the Boys, a group of homeless bums, have recently moved into an unused warehouse owned by Lee Chong, rent-free. Their big adventure is about frogs, lots and lots of frogs. Yup, that’s the story. It’s about frogs. You’ll love it.
- The Painted Word (1975) 112 pages and Radical Chic, That Party at Lenny’s (1970)
Every reader, at some point, should experience the over-the-top prose of Tom Wolfe. I select The Painted Wordbecause it has been argued that the cultural decline of the West began with art, perhaps from Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinal, through the abstract art of Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock.
Not surprisingly, Wolfe has generated a host of enemies—The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker among them. But his white suits and his own gift for self-promotion kept him visible to thousands of readers. Modern art’s avowed “criticism of life,” Wolfe concludes, is nihilistic, the death of art. It is only by talking about these images that they are accepted as art at all. In fact, this king has no clothes.
Picking on Leonard Bernstein, in That Party at Lenny’s, was simply not to be done in New York City at that time, but he did it. Harold Bloom does not like Wolfe, but he admits that he is a “grand entertainer, a true moralist, and a very intelligent and perceptive journalist.”
- The Thirty-Nine Steps 160 pages
The adventure story is always worth trying. A good start would be the Englishman John Buchan’s (1915) story featuring Richard Hannay or John Macnab (1925), 240 pages. These are clubland heroes, not professionals. President JFK and Bobby Kennedy both loved them.
The American Short Story in the Nineteenth Century
- “Young Goodman Brown,”Hawthorne (1835) about 40 pages
- “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe (1841)
- “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville (1853) under 80 pages
There is a theme here which is worth exploring. It has been argued that current American writers seem content with a literature of disorder, concluding with often radical forms of alienation, contradiction, and chaos. But is this new? Perhaps it can be traced to the irreconcilable divisions found in Puritanism, perhaps its roots go back to the late nineteenth century. De Tocqueville spotted it as early as 1840. Certainly the romantic resolutions of the Walter Scott tradition are gone.
This is a field worth exploring.
- The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) 178 pages
This is a very funny book about Adam Appleby, an English literature doctoral candidate with a wife and three children facing the teachings of the Catholic Church concerning birth control. The book contains many literary parodies, including those of Hemingway, Ruskin, Henry James, Kingsley Amis, and Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy in Ulysses. Do you have to recognize all these parallels? It helps, but the humor is still evident.
Certainly anyone can get the joke from Appleby’s own dissertation “The Structure of Long Sentences in Three Modern Novels,” while the great challenge for our hero is distinguishing between life and literature: Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around. That’s clear enough.
David Lodge also wrote Changing Places, a send-up of Stanley Fish and the pretentious academic movement at Duke and other hip English departments of the 70s, very funny but that one is 251 pages.
- The Bear (1942) 48 pages
This story by William Faulkner is clearly the most difficult piece of fiction I have selected. Not everyone will be able to manage it. First of all, it is the fifth chapter in a collection of related stories in Go Down, Moses, so the characters the reader meets have all been introduced earlier. Things are soon cleared up, but only for a short time. What is clear is that this is a story about the big woods and a bear. This wilderness, “bigger and older than any recorded document,” can never be owned or fully known by any mortal—”preserving its ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter—the best game of all.” That’s what Faulkner tells us.
The contest is between these few men out hunting and “the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an area almost one hundred miles square had earned for himself a name, a definite designation like a living man.” This beast is an anachronism indomitable … of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome, and apotheosis of the old wildlife which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at. A young boy, Isaac, 16, joins the hunt, which for the previous five years has been unsuccessful.
The fourth of the five sections of this story is extremely complex. One problem here is that in section four we move ahead five years in time. The boy who was sixteen is now twenty-one and has decided to give up the plantation which he inherited from his father. The crime and incest of his grandfather and their life supported by slaves disturbs him—he believes his land is cursed and that he should be freed from it. He thinks Stonewall Jackson’s being shot by a patrol of his own men was divinely inspired, that God loved the South enough to ensure that it would lose the war. One can possess the wilderness only by loving and respecting it; but his land has been cursed by slavery.
There are also grammatical problems in section four. At one point the reader encounters a sentence that occupies six pages, running more than 1,800 words, in which even connecting subjects to predicates can be difficult. The prose is extravagant, but his theme is eternal. Skip it or blast through it; I hope you will feel Faulkner was worth the effort.
- All In the Dance (2004) 200 pages
Yes, boys can read about dance.
Terry Teachout was a great treasure. An author, critic, playwright (Satchmo at the Waldorf), and biographer (of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong) appearing regularly in Commentary and the Wall Street Journal, he died in January of 2022 at age 66.
This book is a short life of George Balanchine, the founder in 1948 of the New York City Ballet. Teachout wants us to consider how he fits into the larger story of art in the twentieth century. Teachout believes that he was as important as Matisse in art but in a much smaller, tighter world of dance. Arlene Croce has written that if he were a movie director or a playwright instead of a choreographer his studies of women would be the most discussed artistic achievement of the age; put a man and a girl on stage and there is already a story. With a man and two girls, you have a plot. The music, not the speech, drives the power of dance—but we must watch and listen closely.
In some ways Balanchine’s heterosexuality insulated him from many of the crosscurrents of ballet companies, certainly from Diaghilev, for whom he worked in Europe. He loved many women and his tortuous passion for Suzanne Farrell is a powerful story in itself.
Of course, it is possible that Balanchine poured his prodigal energies into a pond too small to hold them—that dance as a serious medium is nearing the end of its run. Ballet is necessarily stripped down, radically simplified when compared with the high-tech, hyped up Knives Out–Survivor media world we live in.
Teachout believes that Balanchine’s lean, stripped down dances were built to last, and that the talented young men and women entering the field will keep them alive. This is an option I urge all young men and women to keep open.
In 2014 Teachout reviewed revivals of the two most influential musicals of the 1970s, Chicago and A Chorus Line but he was most enthusiastic over A Chorus Line about which he wrote, “Most regional companies find it too choreographically challenging to mount, and those that dare to give it a go usually strive to reproduce Michael Bennett’s original production as exactly as possible.” After all, A Chorus Line is not just a show with dancing, it is a show about dancing.
Wight Martindale, Jr. has been an adjunct professor in the Honors Program at Villanova University; wight.martindale@gmail.com. A former vice president at Lehman Brothers, he is the author of Inside the Cage: A Season at West 4th Street’s Legendary Tournament (Simon and Schuster, 2005) and Don Quixote Goes to College: From the Trading Floor to the Classroom, A Memoir on Education (privately printed, 2013). He last appeared in these pages with “Utopia Is a Bad Idea?,” a review of John T. Farrell’s The Utopian Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination (Spring 2025). A longtime board member at NAS, Martindale has recently moved to London for a three-year period to fulfill the educational goals of his wife and high school age daughter. Both wife and daughter were not being served well by the American education system.
Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash