A reading list for Mason: six great books for budding humanists

The blog Why Atheism Is True has an account of an absolutely adorable episode that occurred at an awards ceremony for Christopher Hitchens, in which Mr. Hitchens sat down with an 8-year old girl named Mason Crumpacker for a chat about what books to read. (Video here.) Mason had asked Mr. Hitchens for some suggestions, and his list included such charming reading for children as:

• The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.
• All of Shakespeare.
• PG Wodehouse ("for fun").
• Hume.

Now I haven't read Mr. Dawkins' newest book, nor have I read all of Shakespeare or very much PG Wodehouse, and though while Hitchens is better qualified than most living humans to say what makes a good read, I think he's taking the wrong tact here. He's talking to a young person who is going to go home and look into some of the books recommended to her- only to find most of the material completely inaccessible to her. So, I think I'll offer my own suggestions.

First, if you're a very young person, you probably actually don't want to be delving into ideologically slanted material straight away: hopefully, your beliefs and principles will arise organically out of your family and your environment, and if that sounds like naive optimism, I was raised in a Southern Baptist household in Kentucky and I think I turned out alright. Just absorb your culture by osmosis for now, and save your ideological commitments for after you've had a few years to let everything settle. Besides, this girl Mason is clearly among the brightest of her kind: she will always be reading and exploring regardless of the recommendations, so I hope I don't sound condemnatory of a bibliophilic impulse here. I just think that there are better things for her to read.

Rather than trying to infuse her with the specific tenets of this 21st-century Enlightenment of which people like Hitchens and Dawkins are the champions, she needs the basics: books that encourage children to think for themselves, to take the good from their culture while rejecting the bad, and to take everything their parents say to them (especially "big-picture" stuff like religion and politics) with a grain of salt. Books like:

• Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
  

Easily my favorite work of fiction when I was much younger. This is a book that teaches children to take their own gifts and their own intelligence seriously. It tells the story of a young man far in advance of his peers thrust into the middle of his parents' and his grandparents' war, exploited for those purposes, but who maintains his sanity and his sincerity through camaraderie with the relatively few sane children and adults who are conscripted along with him. This is a book that was written with people like Mason in mind.

• Matilda (Roald Dahl)

Of the vast Roald Dahl corpus, this one is the most harmonious and the most finished. Its protagonist is a young person trapped in an awful family and an awful school with nobody on her side except one teacher and the local library. She reads voraciously, she is always learning, and the amount of bullshit she takes for it all pays off when she puts what she's learned to use feeding that idealistic sense of justice all young people should cultivate. It might be beneath her reading level, but for people in her general age range, this has enough witty dialogue and amusing plot to mask the fact it's a pro-education, pro-learning, anti-conformity screed.

• Encyclopedia Brown (Donald Sobol)
  

A young man finds himself trapped in a vain suburban existence, with an invisible Stepfordian mother and a bumbling incompetent detective for a father, whose problems young Encyclopedia must solve himself for no reward whatsoever. Because the books are written in such a way that the reader can solve the puzzle for herself, readers can quickly adapt themselves to the inescapable fact that, whether you're a young child or a young professional, your role in life is to start fixing the problems you inherit from the previous generation with no reward or recognition other than getting to move on to the next problem.

• The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)

Growing up after 9/11, your child already knows what it's like to watch a majority-white civilization brutally grind a majority-nonwhite civilization into oblivion in the pursuit of ambiguous foreign policy objectives. This book uses the magic of fiction to make the dominant imperialist narrative into a compelling story: mindless hordes of non-whites who look strange and talk funny are foiled in their evil plot to destroy white civilization by some bumbling dwarves, a heroic hereditary monarchy, and an inscrutable magician who wants everything to stay the way it is. Children should be taught to critically evaluate this book's glorification of waging endless wars over storied supernatural trinkets, and ask themselves if they really want a roguish cowboy from the countryside reigning over the mightiest military in the world.

• Harry Potter (JK Rowling)

Harry Potter tells the story of a brilliant young girl named Hermione Granger who studies hard, works hard, and keeps her friends out of trouble, but who is perennially outshined by a handsome and clever white male whose sole claim to fame is not dying as an infant. Slowly dragged into Harry Potter's criminal underworld, Hermione finds herself waging a seemingly pointless vendetta on the defeated old guard of the supernatural oligarchy that selfishly seals away all knowledge in a school monopolized by the soldiers of the previous war. (Those who try to bring this arcane knowledge into the outside world are ruthlessly persecuted.) A great read for informing children that hard work amounts to nothing if you're competing with people who were born with fame and riches already guaranteed to them.

• The Trial (Franz Kafka)

No matter how bright, energetic, or curious a budding young mind might be, it's important to never let them forget that, at bottom, the world is a cold, amoral sludge of confusion and despair governed by the incompetent, soulless minions of orthodoxy who sometimes randomly obliterate people and lives either as an accident of their incompetence or out of their single-minded obsession with reminding the rest of us of their unchallengeable power. Reminding children that lurking behind all their dreams and ambitions is the cold stare of alienation, and that, in the final analysis, nobody is really in charge of the hopeless barren wasteland of misery, resignation, stupidity, and blindness that is humanity and its wretched institutions- but even with nobody at the helm, this horrid mass of drone-like greedy mammals will still grind you into utter oblivion without the faintest care for your petty aspirations, which are themselves manufactured for profit to distract you from how alone you really are. There is no amber, nothing glows: when the sun sets, do not turn on the lights, for all you will see is darkness anyway. Great read for all ages, a real page-turner.