Read the whole thing
11 books, 591,925 words of real text — every chapter, every line, nothing summarised. Highlight any sentence to save it as a note or hand it to the tutor, who can read the page you are on.
On your English 7 list
These two are old enough to be out of copyright, so the whole text is here.
White Fang
Jack London · 1906
A wolf-dog learns the law of the wild, then has to unlearn it. London writes the whole first two chapters from outside any human head.
Pairs with Touching Spirit Bear, The Journey Back
The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare · 1623
A comedy that stopped being funny somewhere in the last four hundred years — which is exactly what makes it worth arguing about.
Pairs with Stargirl, Brave
Read alongside
Public-domain books that pair with a title on the list. Each card says which one and why.
The Call of the Wild
Jack London · 1903
White Fang run backwards: a comfortable dog dragged into the wild instead of a wild one dragged into a house. Read them as a pair and you can see London arguing with himself.
Pairs with White Fang, Touching Spirit Bear
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895
The first great dystopia. Wells builds a future that looks like paradise for about thirty pages — which is the same trick The Giver plays.
Pairs with The Giver, Legend, Surviving Antarctica
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass · 1845
Douglass teaches himself to read and understands immediately why he was forbidden to. Chapter VII is one of the most important things ever written about literacy.
Pairs with Bud, Not Buddy, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, March: Book One, Discovering Wes Moore
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911
Two sour, sickly, unloved children and a locked garden. The closest ancestor of The War That Saved My Life.
Pairs with The War That Saved My Life, Fish in a Tree
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens · 1843
Short enough to read in two sittings, and the cleanest example anywhere of a character actually changing. Watch what Dickens does with weather.
Pairs with The Giver, Walk Two Moons
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain · 1876
The original troublemaker narrator. Twain is doing something sly: the funny voice keeps telling you about a town that is not funny at all.
Pairs with Middle School Is Worse Than Meatloaf, Hoot, The Lightning Thief
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery · 1908
An orphan who will not stop talking arrives at a farm that wanted a boy. Stargirl a hundred years early.
Pairs with Stargirl, Walk Two Moons, The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883
Every pirate you have ever seen is a copy of Long John Silver, and Silver is interesting because you can never decide whose side he is on.
Pairs with The Lightning Thief, Miles Morales: Spider-Man
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling · 1894
Seven stories, not a novel. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" is twenty minutes and is still the best-built short story on this shelf.
Pairs with White Fang
Everything else on the handout is still in copyright, so the text cannot live here. Open that book’s page instead: it has the chapter workshop, the borrowing links for Fairfax County Public Library, and the tutor.