Year 9 and 10 Recommended Reading List

Years 9 and 10 are super important years for developing strong English skills. Whether you're looking for a 40+ in VCE, or simply trying to pass, it's always worth reading more books.

Choosing the right book to read is not always easy, however!

If your son or daughter is in year 10, or even if you reading this are in year 10 yourself, you might be looking for books that can help you improve your English prose before those final key years of high school. If so, this list is a great place to start.

Just note: literature is about the human experience, and hence often brushes with serious themes. Be sure to get a summary of the text before reading if you wish to avoid being shocked.

‍

Best books for years 9 and 10, sorted by century

21st century

1. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
2. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
3. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

20th century

1. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
2. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
3. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
7. Animal Farm, George Orwell
8. The Wind in the WIllows, Kenneth Grahame
9. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
10. The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
11. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
12. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
13. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
14. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
15. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
16. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
17. Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

19th century and earlier

1. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (aesthetic; decadent)
4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
5. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish)
6. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flabert (French)
7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
8. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
9. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
10. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
11. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
12. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
13. Middlemarch, George Eliot
14. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
15. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy