Selected Reading List for Catholic K-12 Schools by Denise Donohue, Ed.D., and Dan Guernsey, Ed.D

Selected Reading List for Catholic K-12 Schools by Denise Donohue, Ed.D., and Dan Guernsey, Ed.D.

Updated February 27, 2019

The following reading list is offered for use with The Cardinal Newman Society’s Literature, Library, and Media Guide for Catholic Educators.

The authors assembled this list based on their experience as educators and Catholic school administrators, and by consulting sources including schools recognized by The Cardinal Newman Society’s Catholic Education Honor Roll for their commitment to strong Catholic identity. The list suggests options for Catholic educators, but it is not exhaustive of all possible literature that might be suitable for Catholic education. Many factors must be considered when deciding which particular works should be included in a curriculum.

This list may be adopted in whole or in part by educators. All Newman Society resources are available for free online at NewmanSociety.org.

K-4

K-4 Fiction- General Adapted Greek and Roman Myths Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes Aesop’s Fables Selected Fairy Tales from Grimm Bible Stories Selected Fairy Tales from Hans Poetry Christian Andersen Folk tales

K-4 Titles Adapted Greek and Roman Myths Angus and the Ducks (Flack) Aesop’s Fables Before I Was Me (Fraser) A Book of Nonsense (Lear) Blueberries for Sal (McCloskey) A Pair of Red Clogs (Matsuno) Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You A Seed is Sleeping (Aston) See? (Martin) Alexander & the Terrible, Horrible, No Caps for Sale (Slobodkina) Good, Very Bad Day (Viorst) Charlotte’s Web (White) An Egg is Quiet (Aston) Clown of God (de Paolo) Andy and the Circus (Daugherty) Cranberry Thanksgiving (Devlin) The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

Curious George Series (Rey) Favorite Uncle Remus (Harris) St. George and the Dragon (Hodges) Frog and Toad Series (Lobel) Storm in the Night (Stolz) Harold and the Purple Crayon (Johnson) The Animal Hedge (Fleishman) Heavenly Hosts: Eucharistic Miracles The Blue Fairy Book; The Red Fairy for Kids (Swegart) Book (Lang) If You Give A Mouse A Cookie The Bobbsey Twins (Hope) (Numeroff) The Children’s Book of Virtues Lentil (McCloskey) (Bennett) Madeline (Bemelmans) The Elves and the Shoemaker (Galdone) Make Way for Ducklings (McCloskey) The Five Chinese Brothers (Bishop & Mama, Do you Love Me? (Joosse) Wiese) Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel The Quiltmaker’s Gift (Brumbeau) (Burton) The Little Engine That Could (Piper) Millions of Cats (Gag) The Little Flower: A Parable of Saint Mirette on the High Wire (McCully) Therese of Lisieux (Arganbright & Molly McBride and the Purple Habit Arvidson) (Schoonover – Egolf) The Little House in the Woods (Wilder) Mr. Popper’s Penguins (Atwater) The Moffats (Estes) Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH The Mystery at Midnight (Hendey) Series (O’Brien) The Princess and the Kiss (Bishop) Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (Steptoe) The Snowy Day (Keats) Nate The Great series (Sharmat) The Story About Ping (Fleck & Wiese) Owl Moon (Yolen) The Story of Ferdinand (Leaf) Papa Piccolo (Talley) The Story of Peter Rabbit (Potter) Peppe the Lamplighter (Barton) The Trumpet of the Swan (White) Peter Pan (Barrie) The Velveteen Rabbit (Williams) Rikki Tikki Tavi (Kipling) The Very Hungary Caterpillar (Carle) Roses in the Snow: A Tale of Saint The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) Elizabeth of Hungary (Jackson & Treasure Box Set (Maryknoll Sisters) Kadar-Kallen) Wee Gillis (Leaf) Saints Chronicles Series (Milgrom & Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak) Davis) Winnie the Pooh (Milne) St. Clare of Assisi Runaway Rich Girl (Hee-ju)

Grades 5-8

Grades 5-8 Fiction Titles

7 Riddles to Nowhere (Cattapan) Ablaze: Stories of Daring Teen Saints A Horse and the Boy (Lewis) (Swaim) A Christmas Carol (Dickens) Adam of the Road (Gray) A Story of Joan of Arc (Earnest) Amos Fortune, Free Man (Yates) A Wrinkle in Time (L’Engle) Anne of Geen Gables (Montgomery)

The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

Around the World in Eighty Days My Antonia (Cather) (Verne) My Side of the Mountain (George) Beowulf: A New Telling (Nye) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Black Beauty (Sewell) Douglass (Douglass) Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of Old Yeller (Gipson) the Iliad (Lee) Our Town (Wilder) Blessed Marie of New France Outlaws of Ravenhurst (Wallace) (Windeatt) Patron Saint of First Communicants Break in the Basilica (Ahern) (Windeatt) Caddie Woodlawn (Brink) Penrod and others (Tarkington) Captain Courageous (Kipling) Pied Piper of Hamlin (Browning) Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand) Pygmalion (Shaw) Death Comes for the Archbishop Radiate: More Stories of Daring Teen (Cather) Saints (Swaim) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson) Redwall series (Jacques) Fingal’s Quest (Pollard) Rip Van Winkle (Irving) Freckles (Porter) Robin Hood (Pyle) Hans Brinker (Dodge) Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) Heidi (Spyri) Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (Taylor) Hero of the Hills (Windeatt) Saint Catherine of Siena (Forbes) Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica Saint Dominic (Windeatt) (Norris) Saint Hyacinth of Poland (Windeatt) Homer Price (McCloskey) Saint John Masias (Windeatt) I Am David (Holm) Saint Martin de Porres (Windeatt) I, Juan de Pareja (de Trevino) Saint Monica (Forbes) If All the Swords in England (Willard) Saint Rose of Lima (Windeatt) Johnny Tremain (Forbes) Saint Thomas Aquinas (Windeatt) Journey to the Center of the Earth Sarah Plain and Tall (Wilder) (Verne) Secrets of Siena (Ahern) Kidnapped (Stevenson) Son of Charlemagne (Willard) King Arthur and His Knights of the St. Benedict, Hero of the Hills Round Table (Green) (Windeatt) Kon-Tiki (Heyerdahl) St. Joan, The Girl Soldier (De Wohl) Lay Siege to Heaven (de Wohl) St. Patrick (Tompert) Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving) St. Thomas Aquinas for Children Leif the Lucky (D’Aulaire) (Maritain) Lilies of the Field (Barrett) Story of a Bad Boy (Aldrich) Little House in the Big Woods (Wilder) Swallows and Amazons (Ransome) Little Women; Little Men (Alcott) Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss) Log of a Cowboy (Adams) Tales of King Arthur (Talbott) Lost in St. Peter’s Tomb (Ahern) Tanglewood Tales (Hawthorne) Madeline Takes Command (Brill & Tarzan Series (Burroughs) Adams) The Adventures of Robin Hood (Green) Midshipman Easy; Masterman Ready The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Marryat) (Doyle) Misty of Chincoteague (Henry) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain)

The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

The Black Arrow (Stephenson) The Secret Garden (Burnett) The Black Cauldron (Alexander) The Song at the Scaffold (Von le Fort) The Blood Red Crescent (Garnett) The Spear: A Novel of the Crucifixion The Boxcar Children (Warner) (De Wohl) The Bronze Bow (Speare) The Story of Our Lady of Guadalupe The Call of the Wild (London) (Walsh) The Children of Fatima (Windeatt) The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow The Children’s Homer (Colum) (French) The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis) The Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss) The Crucible (Miller) The Tale of Despereaux (DeCamillo) The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkein) The Trumpeter of Krakow (Kelly) The Hiding Place (ten Bloom) The Twenty-One Balloons (Du Bois) The Hobbit (Tolkien) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The Hound of the Baskervilles (Doyle) (Lewis) The Innocence of Father Brown [or The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story others] (Chesterton) of the Odyssey (Lee) The Island of the Blue Dolphins The Weight of the Mass (Nobisso) (O’Dell) The White Stag (Seredy) The Jungle Book (Kipling) The Wind in the Willows (Grahame) The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien) The Winged Watchman (van Stockum) The Last Battle (Lewis) The Witch of Blackbird Pond (Speare) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Irving) The Yearling (Rawlings) The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe Thomas Aquinas & the Preaching (Lewis) Beggars (Larnen & Lomask) The Little Flower (Windeatt) Tommy Playfair (Finn) The Living Wood (De Wohl) Treasure Island (Stevenson) The Miracle Worker (Gibson) Trumpeter of Krakow (Kelly) The Miraculous Medal (Windeatt) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster) Sea (Verne) The Pearl (Steinbeck) Two Years Before the Mast (Dana) The Ransom of Red Chief and other Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) short stories (O. Henry) Westward Ho (Kingsley) The Railway Children (Nesbit) Where the Red Fern Grows (Rawls) The Red Badge of Courage (Crane) White Fang (London) The Red Keep (French) Will Wilder Series (Arroyo) The Restless Flame (de Wohl)

Grades 9-12

Grades 9-12 Non-Fiction Titles (original or in translation)

Autobiography (Franklin) Funeral Oration (Pericles) Democracy in America, [selections] (de Harvard Address and/or Nobel Prize Tocqueville) acceptance speech (Solzhenitsyn) Forget Not Love: The Passion of I Have a Dream (King) Maximilian Kolbe (Frossad) Night (Wiesel)

The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

Poetics, Ethics [excerpts] (Aristotle) The Gulag Archipelago [abridged] Self-Reliance (Emerson) (Solzhenitsyn) The Histories [selections] (Herodotus) Slave Narratives (Douglass, Jacobs) The Magna Carta The Apology, Dialogues, Republic The Prince (Machiavelli) [excerpts] (Plato) The Rights of Man (Paine) The Communist Manifesto (Marx) The Rule of St. Benedict The Declaration of Independence The Social Contract (Rousseau) The Federalist Papers [selections] The United States Constitution (Hamilton, et. al) Treatise on Law and excerpts from other The Gettysburg Address (Lincoln) works (Aquinas)

Grades 9-12 Fiction Titles

A Man for All Seasons (Bolt) Huckleberry Finn (Twain) A Voyage Round the World (Dampier) Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo) Aeneid [excerpts] (Virgil) Jane Eyre (Bronte) All Quiet on the Western Front Joan of Arc (Twain) (Remarque) Kim (Kipling) An Enemy of the People (Ibsen) Lieutenant Hornblower Series (Forester) And Then There Were None (Christi) Le Morte D’Arthur (Malory) Animal Farm and/or 1984 (Orwell) Les Miserables (Hugo) Beowulf (trans. Tolkien) Lord Jim (Conrad) Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Lorna Doone (Blackmore) other short stories (Melville) Man in the Iron Mask (Dumas) Brideshead Revisited (Waugh) Metamorphoses [excerpts] (Ovid) Brothers Karamazov or Crime and Mill on the Floss [others] (Eliot) Punishment (Dostoyevsky) Moonstone [and others] (Collins) Canterbury Tales [excerpts] (Chaucer) My Antonia (Cather) Come Rack! Come Rope! (Benson) Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Death Comes for the Archbishop or Antigone (Sophocles) (Cather) Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) Death of a Salesman (Miller) One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Diary of a Country Priest (Bernanos) (Solzhenitsyn) Doctor Faustus (Marlow) Oresteia (Aeschylus) and/or Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak) Andromache or Medea (Euripides) Don Quixote (Cervantes) Paradise Lost [excerpts] (Milton) El Cid (Racine) Portrait of Lady or The American Forget Not Love: The Passion of (James) Maximilian Kolbe (Frossad) Pride and Prejudice (Austen) Frankenstein (Shelley) Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz) Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Red Badge of Courage (Crane) or A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens) Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion, or Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) Emma (Austen) Hamlet, Macbeth, and if possible King Short Stories (Poe) Lear and others (Shakespeare)

The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The Open Boat (Crane) (anonymous) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde) Stories (Chekhov) The Prince (Machiavelli) The Betrothed (Manzoni) The Prisoner of Zenda (Hawkins) The Chosen (Potock) The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) The Cloister and the Hearth (Reade) The Scarlet Pimpernel (Orczy) The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas) The Song of Roland (anonymous) The Divine Comedy [excerpts] (Dante) The Three Musketeers (Dumas) The Epic of Gilgamesh (anonymous) The Thirty Nine Steps (Buchanan) The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) The Time Machine (Wells) The Heart of Darkness (Conrad) The Virginian (Wister) The Hoosier Schoolmaster (Eggleston) To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) The Iliad [excerpts] (Homer) Tom Brown’s School Days; Tom Brown The Invisible Man (Wells) at Oxford (Hughes) The Longest Day (Ryan) Trilby (Du Maurier) The Man Who Was Thursday Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) (Chesterton) Up From Slavery (Washington) The Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy) Vanity Fair (Thackeray) The Odyssey [excerpts or full] (Homer) Wuthering Heights (Bronte)

Authors

Catholic Authors George Bernanos, Laura Berquist, G.K. Chesterton, Louis DeWohl, Shusaku Endo, Graham Greene, Victor Hugo, Mary Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Sigrid Undset, Evelyn Waugh

Other Authors Jane Austin, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Rudyard Kipling, Herman Melville, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare

Poets

Matthew Arnold, W.H. Auden, Hilaire Belloc, William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, G.K. Chesterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Richard Crashaw, Emily Dickenson, John Donne, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, A.E. Hausman, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Joyce Kilmer, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Siegfried Sassoon, William Shakespeare, Percy Shelley, Robert Southwell, Edmund Spenser, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dylan Thomas, Francis Thompson, William Wordsworth, William Butler Yeats

The Cardinal Newman Society Model K-12 Reading List

Spiritual Classics

Confessions [excerpts] (St. Augustine of Summa Theologica [excerpts] (St. Hippo) Thomas Aquinas) Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, or The Bible The Abolition of Man (Lewis) The Desert Fathers [excerpts] Selections from: The Documents of The Imitation of Christ [excerpts] Vatican II, The Catechism of the (Thomas a Kempis) Catholic Church, Veritatis Splendor, The Introduction to the Devout Life Humane Vitae [excerpts] (St. Francis de Sales) Story of a Soul (St. Therese of Lisieux)

Additional Reading Lists:

Institute for Excellence in Writing, (n.d.). Books for boys and other children who would rather make forts all day. Retrieve at https://iew.com/sites/default/files/videocourse/fileattachment/TB- Resources.pdf

About the Authors

Dr. Denise Donohue is the Deputy Director of K-12 Programs at The Cardinal Newman Society. She earned her doctorate in school administration, with a concentration in curriculum development and a dissertation on the establishment of private, independent Catholic schools. She has served as interim chair and visiting assistant professor of a college education department, founder and principal of a Catholic high school, founder and religion coordinator for a Catholic grade school, and assistant head of a Catholic K-12 school.

Dr. Dan Guernsey is the Director of K-12 Programs at The Cardinal Newman Society. He is principal of a diocesan K-12 Catholic school. He earned his doctorate in educational administration and has master’s degrees in English and educational administration. He has worked for over 25 years in Catholic education as a teacher and a principal at the K-12 level and as an associate professor, department chair, dean of education, and president at the college level.

Copyright © 2019 The Cardinal Newman Society. Permission to reprint is hereby granted provided no modifications are made to the text and it is identified as a publication of The Cardinal Newman Society. Note: The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Cardinal Newman Society.