32 classic books for parents and kids to read together

Here are book titles suggested by experts with the Great Books Foundation for parents to read with their tweens and teens.

13. "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

Screenshot from Amazon.com

This romantic novel was published in 1813 and is best for students in high school and older. The story follows the romantic endeavors, and complicated social norms of privileged British society in the early 19th century. The main character Elizabeth Bennet navigates courtship, upbringing, societal standing, while longing for romance and a say in her future. The book has remained a favorite for its romantic themes and has inspired numerous adaptations and spin-offs from authors enamored with Ms. Austen's masterpiece.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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