I thought I would share some of my favourite reading lists with any teacher readers before the onset of the summer holidays.

I wish I could say I had a firm system for these lists. I always try to do one before a long holiday, or even a short one, and definitely one at the start of the year. My students are amazing, though; a small number will start asking me for recommendations and that is how I know it is time to wheel out another one.

I liked the “20 books you should read” format because I thought it seemed manageable. The first was originally made for a very high-achieving year 10/11 class who needed to be stretched and prepared for the rigours of A-level. I also included any books I loved at their age, or that I remember my friends loving. The sixth form list goes further, and has non-fiction texts which are critical but I think accessible.

KS4: 20 books you should definitely read:

1. Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus
2. Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s
3. Tracy Chevalier: The Girl with a Pearl Earring
4. Stephen Kelman: Pigeon English
5. George Grossmith: Diary of a Nobody
6. Vladimir Nabakov: Laughter in the Dark
7. Emma Donaghue, Room
8. David Nicholls, One Day
9. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
10. Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
11. John Irving, The World According to Garp
12. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
13. Bill Bryson, Shakespeare
14. Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel
15. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
16. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
17. Vikram Seth, An Equal Music
18. Richard Llewellyn, How Green was my Valley
19. Steve Tolz, A Fraction of the Whole
20. Richard Russo, Empire Falls

Sixth form:

20 books you should definitely read:

1. Sebastian Faulks: Faulks on Fiction: The History of the Novel in 28 Characters
2. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
4. Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
5. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
6. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
7. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
8. Bill Bryson, Shakespeare
9. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
10. Jay McInernay, Bright Lights, Big City
11. Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain
12. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
13. Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
14. Jane Austen, Emma
15. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
16. Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces
17. Sophocles, Antigone
18. Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
19. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
20. George Eliot, Middlemarch