I'm sure I would have loved this as a teen boy.  It's short, it's fairly quick to read, it's weird, and it has a strange ending.  Now, I'm not loving it, but it's not the book's fault or that of Mr. Vonnegut.  Why?  It came at the wrong time of my life, probably.  But more on that later.

In Cat's Cradle, our narrator, John (or Jonah; he sort of explains that's it's both), tells us the story of his trip Caribbean nation of San Lorenzo and his subsequent adoption of the local religion "Bokononism".  Or maybe it's not about that.  Maybe it's about John (or Jonah's) investigation of the life of one of the (fictional) fathers of the atomic bomb, Felix Hoenikker and his odd children.  Or it's not either of those things.  It could be about the madness of the arms race and the uses and absues of science.  Point being, a weird made-up religion that everyone believes anyway, a dying dictator, and a crazysuper weapon are all involved.  Whatever: it's probably about all these things, and likely some other stuff that I haven't noticed.  

Cat's Cradle is filled with lots of pop philosophy that is great for young minds. This is the kind of book the "cool" English teacher would give his students, the one that opens their minds and gets them thinking.  It feels a bit rebellious, and is a frequent target of banning.  The fairly simple writing and the light humour cover a deeper message, and makes for a thought-provoking story.

As an aside, while I never read this one when I was a teen, I read a couple of others that performed the same role for me: Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein and Jostein Gaarder`s Sophie`s World.  Both explored philosophical ideas from various perspectives, both got weird in the end and both kept me up all night, just thinking about stuff.  I`m sure if I went back I`d find them a bit less appealing, but I loved them at the time.  Are there any books that affected you the same way?

I've never been super keen on short stories.  I don't have any particular reason for this to be so, but the medium never clicked with me.  And yet I like science fiction, and classic science fiction was often born of short stories, often published in digest magazines that collected and serialized works.  Lots of famous sci-fi authors had their debut this way, Philip K. Dick being one of the more notable. 

Dick is probably most well known for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became 1982's Blade Runner, but there have also been a few films over the years that have been drawn from his short stories, including Minority Report, Paycheck, Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau and Total Recall (1990 version with Ahnold and the upcoming Colin Farrell verison). These stories have been collected many times in various permutations under various titles, with reprints often following the release of yet another movie version.

His work is quite varied.  His early career starts of as pretty straight forward action/sci-fi with twisting plots that often revolve around messing with technology, sort of mad-scientist kind of stuff (just look at the movies I listed aobve), but gradually gets more cerebral and philosophical later in his career.  The short stories are a great entry into his body of work for that reason, and that it's easy to skip the boring ones to move on the more exciting plots.  Not all of it is gold, but with dozens of stories, there's usually something for everyone (or at least every type of sci-fi fan).  As usual, I wouldn't

There are many collections, but I recommend: 

We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Second Variety
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford
Minority Report

These are a good start, and doesn't even cover his long form fiction which I'm not so quick to recommend.  Maybe I'll get into that some other day.

If you were to give a boy a book about space travel and a trip to the moon, I'm guessing that a novel written in 1865 wouldn't be the first one you'd come up with.  From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne is the book you may have forgotten, about a gun club trying to build the biggest gun ever, one big enough to shoot the moon!

Seriously.  As in, they are actually trying to get a projectile to the moon.  With a giant gun.

Shortly after the American Civil War, a gun club decides that it would be interesting to see if a cannon could be built that would shoot a projectile to the moon.  Barbicane, the president of the gun club, makes a series of bets with his nemesis that make the construction of the cannon a matter of pride. things get tense, and with money and honour on the line, the consider a radical idea: riding in the projectile and going to the moon themselves.

Mr. Verne goes to great lengths to describe the process of building such a ridiculous thing, from picking the best location and materials to the feasibility of a human traveling in the projectile and surviving, but the book is fairly light, even with all the engineering talk.  The characters are broadly drawn and the situations are reasonably amusing.  Despite all that, the moon landing that seems like a distant memory now (or, my generation and younger, outside of our lifetimes entirely) was over a hundred years away when this book was written, but the proposals and predictions on how to get there are remarkable accurate.  Verne guessed the location, the cost and even the approximate weight of the venture, and even though his solutions to getting to the moon aren't exactly feasible, a lot of it turned out true.

Many of Jules Verne's books are still quite readable, even after 150 years, but it really all depends on the translation (newsflash! He was French).  These are good for all ages, but I think younger teen boys might appreciate these most.  I might have been 12 when I first read it.

I probably don't need to tell you the plot of The Chrysalids, but I'll give a quick overview of it.  David Strorm is born and raised in a village where people with minor abnormalities are considered crimes against nature.  He discovers a friend of his has six toes, and is thus if discovered would be banished or killed.  As the story progresses, we find that this is likely the remnants of our society after what the locals call the 'Tribulation".  Of course, it turns out David, too, has an abnormality: he, along with a few others, are psychic.  The story goes as expected from here.  People find out, a chase ensues, and our heroes pursue freedom, ultimately escaping to a more enlightened society.

This was the first book assigned to me in Grade 10 English class, and was the first book I read in school that I actually enjoyed.  I decided to revisit the book last year to see if it held up, and fortunately it did.  The story was engaging, and the rebuilding of a collapsed society is always a fascinating story to tell, particularly when they don't explain how is collapsed in the first place.  Backstory is overrated (seriously, I mean that. There is something to be said for leaving details to the imagination).  As gamer, the post-apocalyptic world is a familiar one, so that's a plus, and as a Canadian, the setting in remote Labrador is also pretty exciting.

I will say that the writing does seem dated; the language used is a bit formal and certainly full of britishisms.  The edition I read used the classic Courier font printed small and close together (this stuff matters!), so that doesn't help the book.  But the right sell (Mutants! Post-apocalyptia!) should get it in their hands.

Like I said for Lord of the Flies, I know this is often assigned reading.  Get it to them before it gets that far.  Nothing kills the enjoyment of a book more than being forced to write reviews and reports and studies on each and every line.

There's a long gap between New Year's Day and Easter.  For teen boys (and adults who choose to take vacation later in the year), that's a longggggg stretch to go without a break.  At this point in the school year, they are firmly settled, far from the beginning and even longer to the end.  What they need is something completely different.

Lumberjacks, parrots, Silly Walks.  The Spanish Inquition... (I hope you were expecting that.  Wait, what?)

Monty Python.  Yes, they are old.  Yes, PBS doesn't show weekend marathons of it anymore.  Yes, only a small group of kids really get what's going on there, but these are the same kids that read Douglas Adams or understand the references in Ready Player One.  Nerd stuff.  Classic British Humour, the patron saints of sketch comedy.  They aren't for everyone, mind you, but the kids that like them will eat it up.  That leads me to the books, of which there are many.
 
If you can get your hands on them, there is The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All The Words Vol 1 & 2.  These are the complete scripts to the TV series.  These really help when trying to figure what they actually say on the show, given that at times the accents get really ridiculous.  It's not a very fancy volume, but in these two volumes having the complete scripts is pretty cool.





 

The Pythons Autobiography by the Pythons is the oral history of the group, drawing its text directly from interviews and clips from each member (including the dead one).  This is a lot like many of the recent band biographies that take the same approach like The Beatles, U2 and Genesis.  It's more of a coffee table book, full of photos from throughout the troupe's career.  It's an enlightening book, too, as it covers their whole career up to Spamalot, the award-winning broadway play spearheaded by member Eric Idle.





Monty Python and Philosophy is part of the Popular Culture and Philosophy series that considers deeper meanings and concepts that can be drawn from or illustrated by all the nonsense.  The series is pretty hit and miss, since sometimes they have to stretch to make the relevant philosophical points, but it's still pretty neat to have the show 'legitimized' intellectually.






You might note that I don't have any books by Monty Python as a troupe.  They exist, but they are old, weird, and I haven't found any reprints to list.    The ones above are still reasonably available.  Besides, the true experience is in the TV shows, movies, and to a lesser extent, comedy albums.  There is a good chance that the books listed above are already in library collections, so keep an eye out for them.

With the recent passing of Steve Jobs, there has been much about what he helped do to create the modern world.  Much of the focus is on his more recent achievements, such as helping conceive the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, but his influence starts much farther back, in the early days of microcomputing with the Apple I.  His influence reminded me of previous visionaries.  To whit, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick and  2001: A Space Odyssey.

Published in 1968 as a companion work to the film of the same name, it was ahead of its time in many of the predictions it made.  While not particularly accurate on a large scale (no bases on the moon, no tourist travel to space stations, etc.), computers were represented relatively accurately in their abilities.  Sure, there are no superintelligent computers out to kill us, but they do play a mean game of chess.

The story itself is about the evolution of man from its apelike origins to space exploration, all due to a big black monolith that just sort of sits there, in Africa, then the moon, and finally orbiting Jupiter (or Saturn, depending on which version you are reading).  And then some weird stuff that no one understands.

It should be obvious that I won't actually set out the plot of this book in too much detail.  If there is anyone out there who hasn't read it, I'd be shocked.  This book is required reading in pretty much every English-speaking school in the world, and probably in other languages as well.

So why should I even mention it?

Well, think about it like this:  Let's say you, as an adult, absolutely love reading, and wish you could promote every excellent book you read to 13-to 16-year-old boys.  You tell them that there is a particularly interesting book out there that involves a plane crash, a deserted island with mysterious beasts, a bunch of youngish boys and no adult supervision.  And best of all, it's violent and has been banned in many places at one point or another.  (There is also that gross pig's head on the cover which helps.)

Sounds pretty cool...  then you tell them to analyze it chapter by chapter to investigate the meaning of pretty much everything that happens.

I tell you, that's pretty much the worst thing you can do, and will make the kids never trust another adult again when they recommend a book.  Reading is now a chore, no matter how good the book might be.

So here is why I mention this classic: so that you give it to them before it is assigned in class.  I know, I know.  It's violent.  It's got language.  It's difficult. It has concepts we might not want kids to read just yet.  I say too late to worry about that.  I've already recommended Battle Royale, and we all know how popular The Hunger Games books are.  These things are plenty of the above as well.  Here is one that, should a reluctant parent hesitate to give those other books a try, would certainly not mind their kid taking a classic.

Terry Pratchett is a well-established English fantasy writer whose most famous work is the Discworld series.  Neil Gaiman is a bit of a literary Renaissance Man whose dabbles in a little bit of everything, from children's picture books to dark comics to fiction, all of it with a bit of a grim, Tim Burton-esque quality.  The two don't really strike me as particularly similar, aside from both being English and therefore having the British dry humour, but they blend seamlessly here.

Good Omens was published way back in 1990, when both writers were on the ascendant (have either come down yet?).   The story of the approaching End Times, we learn that the Antichrist everyone is expecting was switched at birth and is in fact a regular 11-year-old boy.  Also involved are various parties trying to hasten or prevent the end of the world are the remaining Four Horsemen (Pestilence retired at the advent of antibiotics), an angel and a demon (not your modern kind with the sullen expressions and pining for love, but the real classic versions.  Bad people.)  The plot is a bit tough to nail down, but if you've read either author's work, it a bit like that.

There are different versions, one American and one British, with mostly minor differences, and you should note that this cover I have posted is just one of many.  Good for boys comfortable with complicated plots, the story has plenty of jokes and Terry Pratchett's trademark footnotes to lighten the mood.

In 1959, John Howard Griffin dyed his skin in an experiment. He decided to see what life would be like as a black man in the racially divide South of the United States. Without changing his name or the details of his life, he travelled around, even meeting people he knew who did not recognize him. He was entirely unsurprised to find that he was treated differently, poorly.

Okay, not exactly a classic novel so much as a novel by a classic author. J. G. Ballard wrote mature and complicated science fiction novels, a few of which were filmed into entirely-inappropriate-for-teens movies, such as David Cronenberg's Crash and Empire of the Sun. Normally the books are a bit hard to read and don't have straightforward plots, but for Hello, America he changes it up a bit and creates a pretty clear plot.

This is the grandpappy of books for teen boys. I read this one when I was 12 or 13, and I'm not sure how I got my hands on it. Maybe it found me. I don't know. I do know that I loved it, and it opened a whole new world for me, and that it really kickstarted my adult reading and helped form my tastes from then on, from movies to TV, and obviously reading. The absurd humor, the off-point ramblings, the made up facts from the Guide to the memorable tag line "Don't Panic", it was perfect.