Alex (age 10)'s Reading List

"The book is about the USA’s history from when it was first discovered by Christopher Columbus up to president Kennedy being shot in the head. I like reading about the USA because that is where I was born. Also, I like reading about countries with a lot of land and people because lots of things happen in a big country. There are lots of bad guys and good guys meaning there are wars, battles, killings and crises."

"The British Empire stretched from Canada to India taking up roughly a quarter of the world. The British Empire lasted 470 years from 1490 to 1960. This book is about the rise and fall of the British Empire. It talks about how the British got rich from the slave trade and how they built a huge navy. It’s also about the rebellions in India and how the British got crushed by boulders while invading Sri Lanka. Another bit is how people where massacred in Africa by Henry Stanley and had their ears hanged up. The thing about the British Empire is that it was so big so lots of things happened and boy did a lot of things happen."

"The book Desert Danger is about a royal engineer at the battle of El Alamein . His job is to defuse mines. The book talks about the different mines and how he helps make dummy armies. Also, it talks about night attacks and how the person loses his best friend to machine gun fire when defusing mines. Yes, it is quite sad because it’s about war and in war every single time people die. Sadly, you cannot have a war without bloodshed. So yes all the books I have chosen today are about war and are sad."

"This book is about another royal engineer but his job is very different. In this story, the royal engineer is repairing cables and making radio stations to help communications between the British army. In the book it is around 1917, so near the end of the First World War, but still the royal engineer starts with twelve friends and at the end of the book he has one friend left. So the book showed me the brutality of war. The countries fighting in the First World War were split into two groups: The Triple Alliance made up of Germany, the Austro–Hungarian Empire and Italy and many smaller states. There was also the Triple Entente made up of Britain and her Empire, France, Russia and a lot later on the USA."

"The U-boat was an armed submarine made by Germany that in the First World War sank a lot of ships. Even though at the start of the Second World War they sank a lot of ships, at the end the Allies had good enough technology to sink a lot of U-boats. The book is about a young adult. At the start of the war, his father’s ship is sunk. The U-boat captain kills all the commanding officers in cold blood. The commanding officers were the young adult’s best friends, more like uncles to him than like friends. He promptly tries and joins the navy to find and sink the U-boat captain. He learns about life in the navy and sinks some U-boats, then finally he sinks the U-boat captain and punches him in the nose. The U-boat captain gets hanged for murder. The book teaches you about all the ways of life on a navy ship and that’s why I really like it. My Story."

"I think we’ll start with my favourite book on this list, and that’s Robert Harris , An Officer and A Spy . It’s a retelling of the story of the Dreyfus Affair. It’s fiction, but it’s based on the actual history of the story, and it’s got facts, references to the real ambassadors, generals and diplomats who took part. It tells the story of the Dreyfus Affair from the viewpoint of Georges Picquart, who was the man who investigated it, who was at the time part of the French intelligence service. So the story follows him and his uncovering of the Dreyfus Affair and how people in high places in the French army and government had been actively working against Dreyfus, to protect the honour of the French army, even after the truth came out that he was in fact innocent. The Dreyfus Affair was a series of events from the 1890s to roughly 1906, where a Jewish officer in the French army, Alfred Dreyfus, was accused of leaking military secrets, the designs of an artillery cannon, to the Germans. This was highly charged, due to the fact that only 20 years earlier, Germany had inflicted a humiliating defeat on the French in the Franco-Prussian War. (Well, Prussia had inflicted it). Alfred Dreyfus was blamed for this, even though he had had no opportunity of getting the information on the cannon. He was probably blamed due to being Jewish. Then Colonel Picquart, as happens in the book, investigated the case and found that a French major, Ferdinand Esterhazy, had in fact been the real culprit in the leaking of the designs. Picquart was constantly blocked from revealing this information and there were many trials and eventually Esterhazy was brought to court and Dreyfus was released after years on a solitary island with horrible conditions. He was convicted of treason in 1894, and declared innocent in about 1906, so the whole thing lasted 12 years."

"My second favourite is Alistair Horn, The Price of Glory . It’s about the battle of Verdun in 1916 and covers the entire history. Out of the three Alistair Horne books I’ve read, it’s definitely the one I rank the highest. It’s incredibly interesting, almost taking Verdun, the battle, day by day. It’s very detailed and feels really human. It has stories about people delivering food while the fighting happens, about the air war, the political messages, generals being changed, and how little things cause massive outcomes in the end. For example, a Thuringian peasant was responsible for the taking of Fort Douaumont , the biggest fort in the entirety of the Verdun complex. The French were not defending it and he just crawled through a window. Later, two German companies turned up and took Fort Douaumont without a shot. The book also shows how incredibly close things were. If it had not been snowing three days before, and weather conditions had permitted an attack on the day originally planned, Verdun would have almost certainly fallen. It was only due to the bravery of certain French soldiers in the face of a huge overwhelming force that Verdun managed to be held until sufficient reinforcements could bolster the defences. Yes, for the British it was the Somme and Passchendaele, but for the French and the Germans, Verdun is definitely portrayed in national history as the singular most bloody meat grinder in the entire war. They share this collective memory of World War I. It bled Germany dry. The German army never again had the same fighting capabilities. The French just view it as a matter of national pride, how they defended France till the end, how every bit of soil was sacred. The Germans lost about 350,000; France also had similar numbers, maybe a bit more."

"The next book is probably the most famous of the ones I’ve chosen. It’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. It’s just a very good history of the Third Reich. It’s helped me a lot to understand what the Nazis did in day-to-day life in Germany, and the German public’s opinion of the war. It also gives you really, really in-depth knowledge of the war as it’s happening. I think that’s why it’s so famous. I wouldn’t rank it as highly as the other two books because it doesn’t have the same storytelling potential. But I still find it incredibly interesting on day-to-day events, from an American guy in the middle of the German Reich. Yes. He was kicked out eventually. But I think he was there from 1933 to 1941, basically on the inside. What makes the book really good is that it’s also about the buildup of Germany before World War Two. That’s helped me in my history course as well. It shows how the Nazis controlled Germany. That’s also really interesting, explaining the formation of the Nazi Party, and how it came to be. The stories of Hitler, Himmler, Göring: how those Nazi high commanders basically came from relatively normal lives—Himmler was a chicken farmer—and turned into this party that caused so much destruction."

"This is about the Cold War and the intelligence war between NATO , focusing on the US, and the Soviet Union. It’s got lots of interesting stories and facts about things that went on, like the Americans building some sort of bugging device on an underground Soviet communications cable in Berlin. Even though the CIA thought it was this incredible achievement, apparently the Soviets had already known about it for seven months and they just fed fake information through it. The book also focuses on smaller stories, like a British spy defecting to North Korea, and eventually to the Soviets. It’s got stories from every corner of the game or battle that happened in the backrooms of the USSR and NATO. Yes, it’s very much telling a story. It’s a nonfiction narrative. It goes through all the way from the early Cold War—the original breakdown in relations and how they were already spying on each other—to the development of technology through the years, till it got to a point where you can just have a single bug on your shoulder. The spying technology went from a giant computer in a room to what could be stored in a briefcase."

"Yes, I feel Robert Harris is just really good at telling a story and making it thrilling. The plot really engages you. This is true with his other books as well, like Fatherland and Archangel , even though they’re more alt-history rather than the two that I’ve chosen, which are more based on history. Pompeii is about the eruption of Vesuvius and an aqueduct engineer who finds out about it through the sulphur found in the water supplies of the Roman towns nearby. It’s this plot combined with a power-hungry millionaire, a former slave and his ambition to earn money. It’s got a great ending, and it’s filled with action. It keeps you entertained the entire way through. Yes, you can see the individual towns and how it affected them, you hear about places. Even though the book is not a history, you can see how the average person would have viewed the eruption. Like news comes after three days from around the mountain that this town has just been cut off completely. It’s this very slow development of information that really helps you imagine yourself in the moment. Pliny does feature and his death, sleeping. In the story, he goes out to try and save the library of a friend, who’s living along the shore. The library has incredibly-filled-with-information books, and Pliny feels he needs the Roman navy to come out and save it. So he went out in a ship to try to save it and he did, I think, but he died. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids."

"Yes. I’ve chosen the fourth book in the series, which takes place when he’s 14 about to turn 15 (his birthday is on August 18th). He goes on a quest with his two best friends and his half-brother, who is a Cyclops and they go into the Labyrinth. I should mention that Poseidon is Percy Jackson’s dad and that the Cyclops are mainly from Poseidon’s heritage, according to Greek myth . I should also mention that the gods follow ‘the Flame of the West’, so they base themselves in the most powerful place in the West, which has been America since 1860. So all major structures, including Mount Olympus and the Labyrinth, have moved to the United States. Yes, the same one the Minotaur lived in, that Daedalus designed, but it has grown so is now under the entire USA with lots of entrances around the country. When a monster is killed its essence goes into Tartarus where it re-forms (this takes from 2 weeks to 100 years). The Minotaur was killed by Theseus and is re-formed and comes to hunt demigods again and again. They have to go into the Labyrinth and persuade Daedalus not to let an army from Kronos go through the Labyrinth to attack Camp Half-Blood. Yes, I already told you he’s the son of Poseidon."

"Yes, it’s the last book in the first series. It’s a buildup of everything that has happened for the last four books and a major part of this book, about half of it, is a battle, which is incredibly interesting, considering I like battles. It’s a huge battle between the main forces of Kronos against the Camp Half-Blood demigods. They use all ancient Greek weapons—swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows—and it takes place in Manhattan, because Mount Olympus is on top of the Empire State Building (it’s hidden by ‘mist’ to look like sky to mortals). Yes, it’s literally Mount Olympus on top of the Empire State Building. Yes, but Rick Riordan adds lots of details, like Apollo is always making up really bad haiku poems because he visited Japan and Artemis really hates all boys and men."

"In this book Percy reappears (after not appearing in the first book in this series, which upset a lot of people) in a Roman camp with no memories. Camp Half-Blood is in Long Island, and Camp Jupiter is in California, in the Oakland Hills. He has to immerse himself in Roman Army training, and goes on a quest with two people, to retrieve the legion’s eagle which they’d lost when travelling to Alaska. Alaska is called the land beyond gods, so gods cannot interfere. Along the way, they go through multiple adventures. They find the legion’s eagle with a giant who can’t be killed as long as it’s on its homeland, so they have to lure it away. At the end of the book there is another huge battle between the Romans and the giants’ armies."

"The Mark of Athena is the third book in the series. It’s my favourite book out of all of them, because it’s finally a combination of the Roman and Greeks getting together and going on a big quest to destroy Gaia, the primordial embodiment of the Earth. Because she had children, the giants and the Titans, and the Titans were her favourite children. She went to sleep, and when she woke up the titans had been overthrown so she made the giants and made them go after the gods. The gods managed to defeat them and make Gaia go back to sleep. Now she is trying to wake up again, and there’s a lot of side adventures along the way. It’s one of the more funny books out of the series, and Gaia is in Greece so a lot takes place in Greece. On the way to Greece they stop in Rome to destroy twin giants called Otis and Ephialtes, because their friend, Nico di Angelo, is imprisoned by the giants. The end of the book is the biggest cliffhanger you can imagine, so afterwards you do have to finish the series. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . These books by Rick Riordan are the best books I’ve ever read. I read a lot of books, I just read them to pass the time. These books actually latched onto me and I couldn’t stop reading them. They gave me entertainment and something to look forward to. With most fiction books I just read them and finish and never look back or want to read them again. But I’ve done that multiple times with these books, I think I’ve read The Mark of Athena nine times. I just haven’t had time to get into them yet. I think they are really good. You just need to get used to them, eventually I think I will get going on them. After you’ve read Percy Jackson, it doesn’t get you hooked as quickly. What I mean is that with Percy Jackson, you’re immediately hooked in the first chapter, but not so much with the Mark of Kane. But I think all of Rick Riordan’s books on mythology are good. I think that’s part of it. They’re all magicians casting spells with hieroglyphs, so it’s hard to get used to, whereas you already know so much about Greek myths before. From Stephen Fry’s Mythos (and when I was really young, Atticus the Storyteller’s 100 Greek Myths) , but then Rick Riordan taught me more fine details. A lot of people call Rick Riordan ‘Uncle Rick.’ He originally wrote them because his son had ADHD and dyslexia and he loved Greek myths. To help him with that, he taught his son more about Greek myths which he loved. At the time, Rick Riordan was an English teacher. And Haley, his son, said, ‘You should write it in a book.’ The first book is dedicated to Haley. Haley even wrote a short story, which was actually pretty good, when he was 16. In the books, Percy Jackson has ADHD and dyslexia too. It helps in battle, you can look around more easily, and dyslexia makes you hardwired for reading Ancient Greek."

"Magnus Chase is a demigod, the son of the god Frey. His mother was killed by wolves. He doesn’t know who his Dad is and he has a phobia of wolves. He lives in Boston and is a homeless person. The Percy Jackson series are about the Greek gods, this series is about the Norse gods and this is the first book in the series. Magnus has two friends, called Blitz and Hearth, who pretend to be homeless as well to look after him. Hearth is deaf and can’t speak and is an elf and Blitz is a dwarf. He has two uncles, one is a professor, the other is the dad of Annabeth Chase in the Percy Jackson series. Before she died, Magnus’s mum told him not to speak to her brothers, but of course he does, and ends up in Valhalla. I actually only started reading this series because Percy Jackson appears in one of the books. It’s still one of the best series I’ve read, but since it had no Percy Jackson in it, it doesn’t get as much love. I don’t know."