Speaking of classics and required reading and such, I just got Nate's proposed summer reading list and thank GOD he only has to pick one book to read. What a depressing list!

The Spy Who Came in From the Sea / Peggy Nolan A fourteen-year-old moves to Florida at the height of World War II to join his father, a Navy seaman, and soon develops such a reputation for exaggeration that when he announces having seen an enemy spy land on the beach, no one believes him.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens / Steven Covey

The House of Dies Drear / Virginia Hamilton A family moves into an enormous house once used as a hiding place for runaway slaves. Mysterious sounds and events as well as the discovery of secret passageways make the family believe they are in grave danger.

Stand Tall / Joan Bauer Tree, a six-foot-three-inch twelve-year-old, copes with his parents' recent divorce and his failure as an athlete by helping his grandfather, a Vietnam vet and recent amputee, and Sophie, a new girl at school.

Black Beauty / Anna Sewell A horse in nineteenth-century England recounts his experiences with both good and bad masters.

The Westing Game / Ellen Raskin The mysterious death of an eccentric millionaire brings together an unlikely assortment of heirs who must uncover the circumstances of his death before they can claim their inheritance.

Julie of the Wolves / Jean Craighead George While running away from home and an unwanted marriage, a thirteen-year-old Eskimo girl becomes lost on the North Slope of Alaska and is befriended by a wolf pack.

Hope Was Here / Joan Bauer When sixteen-year-old Hope and the aunt who has raised her move from Brooklyn to Mulhoney, Wisconsin, to work as waitress and cook in the Welcome Stairways diner, they become involved with the diner owner's political campaign to oust the town's corrupt mayor.

The Not-So-Star-spangled Life of Sunita Sen / Mitali Perkins When her grandparents come for a visit from India to California, thirteen-year-old Sunita finds herself resenting her Indian heritage and embarrassed by the differences she feels between herself and her friends.

The Westing Game! That one is one of my favorite books ever.

I think the only other one I've read from that list is Black Beauty. The House of Dies Drear sounds really familiar, but I can't remember actually reading it.

I think I am going to cry just thinking about Black Beauty! Man, that was killer. And yet I read it over and over and over again.

The Westing Game is awesome, and not depressing at all.

I love Black Beauty and at least he gets a happy ending.

I've read that, the Westing Game, and Julie of the Wolves (which may not have such a happy ending).

The Westing Game was the one book that sounded as if it could be interesting to him out of the lot. Of course, I have a knee-jerk reaction to Black Beauty, because it made me sob like a baby.

Main reason I said it was depressing, was that it just seems overall a very limited list when there are so very many books they could choose from.

Seems to me too that I read Black Beauty and Julie of the Wolves in fourth or fifth grade and this is a seventh grade list.

I read The Westing Game around fifth grade, I think.

I'm trying to remember what I read in seventh grade English. Only thing I can think of is Where the Red Fern Grows, which is also depressing.

So many tear-jerker animal stories for the young.

We read The Red Pony and The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade.

Lots of tearjerkers.

We read The Red Pony in ninth grade and Diary of Anne Frank in eighth.