You as the parent, of course, will have to exercise discernment. Many private schools, both Christian and non-Christian, publish a list for elementary and secondary students. The English department of a good Christian college may be able to furnish you with book titles for high school students. Books about books, such as Gladys Hunt's Honey for a Child's Heart and Elizabeth Wilson's Books Children Love , are highly worthwhile. A book place in our area to which home-schoolers flock is the Book Place, a huge warehouse of new and used books with an entire wall devoted to older classics and biographies.
Literature gives pleasure, plain and pure.
The dimensions of pleasure are varied, beginning with words themselves. Read to your children and have them read to you and each other. The better part of good literature is its music. What mattered was the sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world. And these words were, to me, as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments, the noises of wind, sea, and rain, the rattle of milkcarts, the clopping of hooves on cobbles, the fingering of branches on a window pane, might be to someone, deaf from birth, who has miraculously found his hearing.