Complementary to my post asking for social books, I’m hot on a series with serious geekery. The “George” series by Stephen and Lucy Hawking is a hit in our house. I’m looking for a series roughly at that reading level (so higher level of reading than Magic Treehouse) that features computer science/hacking or straight up science. The trick is, this has to be a series (school literacy project) featuring the same main character(s). Harry Potter was dinged (by S1) for being about magic. He in interested in a main charter that is a hacker, scientist or inventer
Encyclopedia Brown, if you want something more old fashioned and less edgy than Artemis Fowl, who is a bit of an anti-hero. (But fun!) Would he like science fiction? I’m not coming up with something quite like what you described, but my kids like John Christopher’s Tripod books, Heinlein’s juveniles (Have Space suit, will travel etc.), Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series in particular.
Tom Swift! the original boy inventor is still in print! Einstein Anderson is probably not hard enough, um…Philip Reeve’s Hungry Cities are maybe too fantastical. Cory Doctorow’s books are very geeky, but content is often mature (theres some gf snogging) and they are related, but not a series.
Ender’s Game and the rest of the series, Orson Scott Card, (lots of interesting moral questions worth discussing)
My boys also got into Michael Crichton at this age. They started with Jurassic Park. Crichton’s books always had some sort of science theme. Jurassic Park is cloning and chaos theory. One of the others was AI. He was usually dealing with something pretty topical.
It really will depend on the child. I recommend you read them first and decide.
My kids and their friends were reading Ender’s Game, Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere before age 10. I can only remember this because of debating whether they could see Jurassic Park when it came out and the fact they had already read the book. It wasn’t too scary for them. It was pretty much too scary for me. I had to shut my eyes.
They all adored the Ender books.
I just about had a heart attack when my 12 year old nephew was visiting and reading Card’s Lost Boys which I thought was way too intense for him, and told him to come get me if it gave him nightmares. No problem for him, though. Sometimes it isn’t clear to me exactly what they are understanding when they read that sort of thing. I didn’t even want to ask about Lost Boys unless he brought it up, which he didn’t.
A book your son might like (although it wouldn’t work for this project) is the nonfiction “Uncle Tungsten,” by Oliver Sacks. It’s about his life as a child and teenager in England. He did lots of interesting science projects, just because he could.
I was going to suggest Ender’s game, as above, but hesitated because the age of S1 wasn’t given. As I recall some of the later books in the series can get a little mature, not gratuitously, but because it deals with general concepts of humanity. But if you are looking for a long series, with the same main character, this on is a great read.
Another one to consider is the Asimov Foundation series. The first few books have the same characters, but they cover a few thousand years so they really don’t make it to the end.
Probably does not meet the requirement of science, but the five books of the Hitchhikers Trilogy are a fun read.
S1 is 7. He meets the criteria for Aspergers Syndrome. He is in a mainstream public school second grade ICT class. He struggled with reading then it exploded. He probably reads 50 pages a day for pleasure. He is addicted to books. The more science and technology the better. His favorites are Dinotopia, George & the Universe series and (of course) Calvin and Hobbes.
At 7, Foundation would be lost on him, and Hitchhiker would be simply inappropriate. Ender’s game is likely not a good choice either, but I would suggest you read it first.
I think my S1 was about that age when he found the Andrew Lost series of books. Give that a look.
@scmom12 My youngest just ‘discover’ our Heinlein stash of books. I had to go through it and pull out the young adult titles for him, he’s not yet ready for Stranger In a Strange land. Funny thing is that he doesn’t get how long ago the books were written and will sometimes ask me odd questions like “what’s a phone cord? wasn’t his phone charged?”
