A western story, a little known series of war books, a book about growing up on a farm in early America, a shipwreck story, a pirate story, a book about a boy training to be a knight, a book about growing up along the Mississippi River in 19th century America, an avenger story, a survival story, a dog story, a story about growing up in Africa, a jungle story.

• Shane, by Jack Shaeffer;

• The Military Lives of ... series, by Trevor Dupuy

• Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

• Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson;

• Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

• The Mark of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley;

• Down the Long Hills, by Louis L’Amour

• Lassie Come Home, by Eric Knight

• West with the Night, by Beryl Markham

• The Jungle Book, by Rudyard Kipling

Here is a list (mostly) of the classical classics, the stories of Ancient Greece and Rome, with a few medieval stories and one eastern one thrown in to spice up the list. I have also included the Bible, which itself, in addition to being Holy Writ, is an ancient text. They are the stories that were widely read in schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but were slowly dropped as the interest in academic learning was displaced by social and political goals in schools. Many of them are, as indicated available from my publisher, Memoria Press. But all of them can be found by searching the two best used book websites: http://used.addall.com/ and bookfinder.com. Enjoy

• The Golden Children’s Bible (available from Memoria Press)

• D’Aulaire’s Greek Mythology (available from Memoria Press)

• Aesop’s Fables for Children, Milo Winter (available from Memoria Press)

• Rainbow Fairy Books, Andrew Lang

• Fifty Famous Stories Retold & Fifty Famous People, James Baldwin

• The Wonder Book & Tanglewood Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Plutarch’s Lives for Boys and Girls, W. H. Weston

• The Trojan War, Olivia Coolidge (available from Memoria Press)

• The Heroes, by Charles Kingsley, or The Golden Fleece, by Padraic Colum

• The Adventures of Robin Hood, Roger Lancelyn Green (available from Memoria Press), or The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood (advanced)

• King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green (available from Memoria Press), or The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, by Howard Pyle (advanced)

• Arabian Knights, Andrew Lang

• Stories of the East from Heroditus, Alfred J. Church

• Stories from the Greek Tragedians, Alfred J. Church

• The Iliad for Boys and Girls, Alfred J. Church, or the more advanced actual text, The Iliad, Homer (trans. Samuel Butler) (available from Memoria Press)

• The Odyssey for Boys and Girls, Alfred J. Church, or the more advanced actual text, the Odyssey, Homer (trans. Samuel Butler) (available from Memoria Press)

• Aeneid for Boys and Girls, Alfred J. Church, or the more advanced actual text, The Aeneid, Virgil, (trans. David West) (available from Memoria Press)

• Stories from Livy, Alfred J. Church

• Tales From Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb

The one I chose was a monster of some sort, black, with huge shoulders and menacing teeth. I paid the cashier $3.95 and took it home to present to my son.

He loved it. It became one of his favorite toys.

A few weeks later, he accidentally dropped something on the monster and the arm broke off. He was devastated. This terrible, horrible monster, with fangs and a fearsome face, was now left with only one arm. One of his favorite monsters, now headed to the Island of Misfit Toys.

Life can be terribly unkind to a three year-old boy.

After he was put to bed, I wondered if there wasn't some way to address the problem. I could buy him a new monster, of course, but I realized it was unlikely I would find the same one. I think it was the only one available when I bought it and it was unlikely that I could replace it.

My wife, however, already had some expertise in replantation surgery on toys. She tried several times to reattach the limb with glue, but the arm kept breaking off.

After several attempts over a period of days, the maternal authorities finally announced that there was nothing else they could do. There was no hope for the monster. My son's hopes were finally extinguished.

We tried to assuage his grief, but it availed nothing. For several nights he slunk off sadly to bed.

On the third or fourth day of his bereavement, I got an idea. An awful idea. A horrible, terrible, awful idea.

That night, I searched around and found some red model paint and discovered a small, pencil-sized brush in the kitchen drawer. I opened the paint and dipped the brush in it. I applied the paint on the now armless shoulder of the monster—lots of paint, so that it dripped down the side of the monster in a gruesome stream.

I set it proudly on the kitchen window sill so that it might dry overnight.

The next morning, my early-rising wife made her way into the kitchen, and discovered the monster, now more gruesome than before, staring at her from the window sill. If she screamed, I didn't hear it. I was still asleep.

I don't remember exactly what she said to me after I crawled out of bed that morning , but I'm pretty sure it included her oft-repeated exclamation—the lament, I'm pretty sure, of many mothers with male children (and a husband): "I'll never understand boys."

When my son woke up, I presented him with the now modified monster, replete with newly acquired gore.

He took it in his hand. His eyes widened, he turned the monster from side to side. He touched it all over. He looked at it from every angle. Slowly, a grin formed. And the grin grew into a broad smile. Finally, he began dancing around the house, holding the monster high in the air.

After his reverie abated, he took the monster reverently to his mother. And said proudly, "Look Mommy, look at my monster!!!"

My wife set down her coffee. She examined the gruesome object with suspicion. Then she turned and examined me—with even greater suspicion. "I DON'T understand boys," she said again, and resumed her breakfast.

Not only did he like the newly adorned toy. He loved it. He liked it far better than he had before. It became, for a while, the chief object of his boyish adoration.

I don't know whatever happened to the toy. Undoubtedly it was the victim of one of the many decluttering purges conducted in our house over the years. But if I ever find it again, I'm going to wrap it and give it as a gift to one of his own boys to see what they make of the gruesome one-armed monster my son loved so well.

The old books weren't cynical or psychological. They didn't ask you to dwell on your inner feelings or psychoanalyze yourself or cause you to feel aggrieved about something. They took you outside of yourself and the time you lived in so you could experience the thoughts and actions of other people in other places.

When I was in school, we had to hide the cheesy literature inside the classic books we were supposed to be reading. Now kids have to hide the classic books inside the trashy ones they assign at school. Not only are schools now increasingly willing to replace classic books with "YA" or "Young Adult" literature, but classic literature is increasingly the target of the Tolerance Police.

This is unfortunate, since modern students are far more in need of the classics than was my generation (the late baby boomers).

Partly because of the prevalence of digital technology, modern students live in a very culturally homogeneous world. Between video games and text messaging, today's young people--literally and figuratively--don't get out much.

Add to that the fact that the modern pop culture they imbibe through their smart phones is largely self-referential: Almost every allusion in modern film and television is to something else in modern film and television. Hollywood doesn't seem to have any knowledge of anything outside of Hollywood. American media culture in particular is extremely inbred in a way that British visual media in particular and European media in general, are not.

In prior generations, most people read books, and they commonly read books we now consider classics. We tend to forget that authors such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck were not just great writers, but very popular ones. But even if you were not much of a reader, classic literature and history were an integral part of the popular culture you grew up in.

You didn't have to even read the classics if you grew up in the 40s, 50s, or 60s to know a) what they were; and b) what they were about. They were common reference points in movies, on television, in comedy routines, and in popular music. Just go back and look at the Warner Bros. cartoons during the Golden Age of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and Fritz Freleng. They were chock full of references to classic books and movies, World War II, the founding fathers, the Civil War, and ancient history.

If you think "Looney Tunes" is merely a good description of the current politically correct nonsense now going on in schools, you're wrong. The real Looney Tunes were nothing if not culturally literate.

Disney has been the subject of controversy over how it sometimes changed classic stories, but the more important point is that they treated them at all. Disney not only told and retold the folk tales and history of America and the world on television and in its films (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, Zorro, Old Yeller) it created rides and attractions at its theme parks based on them (Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio, The Wind and the Willows), each having an attraction devoted to it.

Disney no longer builds rides based on books. Instead it makes movies based on rides (Pirates of the Carribbean, Jungle Cruise,The Haunted Mansion).

Pop culture no longer does what Warner Bros., Disney, and virtually every film and television studio used to do. Movies refer to other movies, television shows to other television shows. Rather than surveying our culture's long and interesting history and literary tradition for story plots and settings, an astounding number of contemporary movies are now either sequels or reboots of other recent movies (Star Wars, Star Trek, Mad Max, Spiderman, Captain America, Batman, Planet of the Apes, etc. etc.)—or reboots of reboots.

Culture is now cannibalistic, feeding on itself.

In this cultural context, it is easy to see why a modern student would be in greater need of books that take them outside the narrow, culturally illiterate world he inhabits. Unfortunately the people who now run most schools were products of the first culturally illiterate generation--roughly the Generation Xers. They too are narrowly acculturated and hence cannot even understand the benefits of broad culture literacy.

We now have schools that both censor classic books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Grapes of Wrath on the one had, and carry sexually explicit books in the library (or assign books pushing LGBT content) on the other.

When I was in 4th grade, I remember getting the paper book catalogs from our teachers and finding books like Call It Courage, by Armstrong Sperry, Outlaw Red, by Jim Kjelgaard, and Rascal, by Sterling North. I would go home and ask my mother for the $3 the teacher said I had to bring to school to order it. These weren't cynical or psychological. They didn't ask you to dwell on your inner feelings or psychoanalyze yourself or cause you to feel aggrieved about something. They took you outside of yourself and the time you lived in so you could experience the thoughts and actions of other people in other places. As for many of what publishers push today, I wouldn't have have given 3 cents, much less 3 dollars for it.

Take that contemporary dragon book in your hand right now, set it down, and don't take another look at it until you have completed reading the books on this list of classic fantasy stories. No one should think about reading or writing a modern dragon story (like many boys seem to want to do now) until he has familiarized himself with the greatest stories in the fantasy genre. It'll take him until he is 45 years old to finish them all, of course, and by then he will be fully equipped to write a dragon story, but no longer interested in doing it. Which is just fine. There are way too many modern dragon stories out there anyway.

The Princess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis
"The Sword of Welleran," by Lord Dunsany
Puck of Pook's Hill, by Rudyard Kipling
The Arabian Nights Entertainment, by Andrew Lang
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Worm Oroborous, by E. R. Eddison
The Earthsea Trilogy, by Ursula Le Guin
The Volsunga Saga, by William Morris

How many of us remember that the Russians colonized much of the Alaskan coastline in the mid 18th to the mid-19th centuries? Hands please? No one? That's what I thought. That's because we don't teach history anymore. One of the best ways to learn American history is read western novels, particularly those of Louis L'Amour.

I was just getting over the depression that had set in when I realized I had listened to the last Louis L'Amour novel available on Audible.com when, lo, I get an announcement that the company has just released Sitka, his 1956 historical novel about Alaska, read by Jason Culp, one of the great L'Amour readers. I don't know of any other L'Amour novel that discusses Alaska, except maybe Last of the Breed, in which we are told, at the end that the protagonist is headed to Alaska from Russia in a boat. How many of us remember that the Russians colonized much of the Alaskan coastline in the mid 18th to the mid-19th centuries? This is a story of the undeclared war between the Russians and the other European settlers for one of America's last contested territories. L'Amour, one of America's great storytellers, was an author you could always count on to provide his readers a great story while teaching you lessons about life, history, and the virtues of courage, manliness, and good judgement.

I remember many years ago visiting my grandfather, my mother's father, in San Diego. He was a plumber and lived in a trailer park. I think he wasn't expecting us, and when we came in, he had a book in his hand, which he set down to greet us. It was a paperback book, and I still remember the title: Bendigo Shafter.

I don't know why I remembered this title, maybe it was because it was an unusual one. I remember thinking that "shafter" was some kind of job, like on an oil rig or something. And maybe Bendigo was the place they were drilling.

Several years ago, I read the book myself. I think I must have been around the age my grandfather was when we visited him that day, give or take two or three years. I discovered that the title of the book was a man's name, and that the book, a western by Louis L'Amour, was about pioneers trying to establish a civilization in midst of a wilderness.

I was reading it because I had recently discovered the value—not to mention the pure pleasure, of reading western novels. I had always had a low view of westerns, thinking they were, literarily speaking, cheap entertainment. Something great for a rainy day when you had nothing else to do, but not worth taking the trouble to seek out or spend much time on. There were so many other, important books to read. Who had time for these anyway?

I imagine I am not the only one who remembers these books laying around at an older relative's house. Cheap paperbacks, dog-eared, and looking like they were either bought used, or read several times. But even before I had re-evaluated such books, I bought them for my children. My oldest son read many of them, and my daughter, who has always had a love of horses, devoured them. I can still remember seeing my daughter's bookshelf with about 30 volumes, mostly by Louis L'Amour, but others also by Max Brand and Zane Gray. I was choosy about what my children read, but I don't remember why, at the time, I thought these books were deserving of my children's attention. But I know now.

The western novel has served American culture in the same way that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey served the Greeks, and in the same way that Virgil's Aeneid served the Romans: It told them who they were as a people. The Greeks defined themselves on the basis of the events of the Trojan War, a definition that was later expanded by the Greek tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as (in a different way) the comic poet Aristophanes. The Romans too saw themselves in the mirror which Virgil held up to them through his story of the hero Aeneas fleeing the burning city of Troy as it was sacked by the Greeks carrying his father on his back and with his son in tow.

Later (so the story goes), Aeneas founds Rome in what we now know as Italy.The seminal event in Greek history is the story of the Trojan War; the seminal event in Roman history is the story of the founding of the New Troy on the banks of the Tiber River.

What is the seminal event in American history?

We could say it was our founding. That is a great story in itself. But, more generally, the defining event of our history was the conquest of the American west. This was the event (a long series of events, actually) that defined our ideals and values as Americans and made us into the courageous, pragmatic, inventive people that we became.

When you read the stories of our nation's role in the wars of the twentieth century, you get a sense of why our armed forces were so effective. The young men who were drafted out of small towns across the country—young men who grew up helping their fathers fix the farm equipment, or who turned a wrench at the local car repair shop, or who cooked at the local diner—these were the same young men who were sent to Normandy and invented a device on the spot that could allow American tanks to squeeze through the hedgerows; and who were sent to the Pacific as members of the Seabees, the special Naval engineer corps who could repair an airplane runway bombed into oblivion by the Japanese and have it up and running in two days.

Or, at least, this was the people we were. In recent decades, decades that have made us soft and lacking in cultural confidence. This, I think, is both caused and is the result of the decline of the western literature. If you read anything about the Greeks or Romans, you will know of the importance they gave the stories of their civilization. These were not just stories of their civilizations, but they were they way they passed on their civilization to succeeding generations.

America without the western is like Greece without Homer, or Rome without Aeneas, which is to say, they would not be Greece and Rome at all.Civilization is precarious thing, and it is through stories, both about real and imaginary things, that it is passed on.

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is, have an aversion to boys.

Several years ago, The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an article by Robert Lipsyte article that attempted to address this problem. Here was his proffered solution:

[B]oys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers.

Excuse me while I dab my eyes delicately with my handkerchief, touched as I am by this tender thought.

I’m normally against shooting spit wads in class, but I am willing to make an exception in this one case. The entire educational establishment has tried for over 50 years to force boys into their effeminate mold, and in the process, they’ve succeeded in evacuating literature of all the things boys like in books: action, adventure, danger, bloodletting—and an iron moral code that is taught, not by smarmy sermonizing, but by immersing them in the moral universe of a story about a hero who not only believes in this code, but enforces it with a vengeance.

In more recent years boys have sought refuge in cheesy horror novels because the Cultural Authorities won’t give them the adventure books that were once staples in every boy’s life. It is to this I attribute the popularity of vampire novels in recent years (and movies and television shows). But even here a boy is destined for disappointment.

In fact, the extent of our modern cultural crisis can be at least partly measured by the plight of the vampire. The vampire of yore was an evil and only partly human creature. He sucked people’s blood and didn’t second guess himself. The modern vampire is the pure creation of the modern therapeutic mindset: a tortured emotional soul dealing with his vampire condition as if it were some kind of psychological neurosis.

The vampire of old was a danger to others; the modern vampire is a danger primarily to himself. The vampire of old looked into the mirror and saw nothing; the modern vampire looks into a mirror and sees the other part of his bi-polar self. Dealing with the vampire of old required only a stake through the heart; dealing with the modern vampire involves months on the psychologist’s couch.

The pure evil of the traditional vampire is a rebuke to the modern relativism that dominates our culture, which avoids unadulterated evil because it implies an equally unadulterated—and unacceptable—good. We are no longer man enough to take our morality straight: it must be watered down with psychological platitudes, and hence morality has been replaced in young adult literature by therapy, and boys have fled in droves.

Heroism can never be completely eliminated from literature because we are naturally attracted to it. And so, when it is repressed (if you will forgive my commission of psychologism in the very act of criticizing it), it always comes back in some other form.

This accounts for the continuing popularity of comic books and the more recent phenomenon of superhero movies. Our culture (to give the most obvious instance) has never fully recovered from the demise of the classic western. In an age in which we were not ashamed of it, we put them in a historical context. These were things that really could—and sometimes did—happen. But in the modern era, we are not supposed to admire great men, largely because we are uncomfortable with the whole idea of greatness. So today we relegate our heroes to the realm of the fantastic. They are now figures who could never really be, doing things that can never really be done.

And even here, the therapeutic is never far off. Every modern superhero must deal with the psychological consequences of something from his childhood: for Spiderman it is the murder of his uncle; for Batman the murder of his parents; and, of course, Superman’s planet has been blown up. The modern superhero wreaks havoc on the bad guys less because he is pursuing truth, justice, and the American way than because it is the only way he can work out his angst. This is less so with Superman and more so with Batman.

The mother of a friend of mine in high school was a famous psychologist. One day I noticed padded bats propped up against the wall and asked, “What are those?” My friend told me they were for her mom’s patients so they could act out their anger without hurting anybody. Common people get to work out their anxiety with padded bats, but we don’t get to actually destroy anything. Batman, on the other hand, gets a helicopter, a fast car, and a cool costume—and destroys half a city.

Life just isn’t fair.

I have three boys, mostly grown now. Not a one of them ever needed to be led into “deeper engagement” with his life. Had you asked my wife about it at the time, she would have told you that they were all way too engaged in their own lives and that they needed to think about something else—like cleaning their rooms or mowing the lawn. And I hate to think of what would have happened if anyone had tried to “prick their dormant empathy.”

To any healthy boy, those are fighting words.

Boys, though they cannot articulate it, can usually see right through the modern psychobabble. In fact, say what you will about the Harry Potter books, for example (and plenty has been said), they at least betray a consciousness of the old adventure ideal, and are light on the psychological reflexiveness—at least in the early books in the series, although I am told (I never read them) that the later books portray a more effeminate Harry.

Some people have the mistaken impression that it was traditional children’s literature that was preachy. This is not only untrue, but it is almost the exact opposite of the truth. In fact, it is precisely the preachiness of politically correct modern literature that offends their innate sense of honesty and justice—a human instinct that we do our best to educate out of them.

Boys are not interested in getting in touch with themselves, and it is particularly off-putting when they are told that it is good for them. The minute the politically correct schoolmarms approach, they head for the woods, where they are free to pick up sticks and pretend they are swords and fight monsters and hunt frogs and swing from trees—anything but to be preached at by people whose sermons consist of high-minded meaninglessness.

Most boys are born cynics and are rightly suspicious of moralistic platitudes. They respect words only to the extent that they see them followed by actions. Tell them (in mere words) what the right thing to do is, and they will look at you suspiciously and walk away. Do the right thing—preferably at the risk of your own person or reputation, and they will follow you in zealous allegiance.

The older authors of books for boys knew this: they forsook the sermonizing for the story of men in action. There were, of course, the old dime store novels, and then the pulps: the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Jr., Biff Brewster, Doc Savage, Tom Quest. And then there were the books of high adventure, written primarily for adults, but enjoyed (mostly by older) boys: the G. A. Henty, Johnston McCulley, Anthony Hope, H. Rider Haggard, P. C. Wren, Howard Pyle, C. S. Forester, as well as Western authors like Louis L’Amour and Max Brand—these were authors boys not only didn’t avoid, but sought out.

Even a few female authors were on to this secret about boys: Baronness Orczy, she of Scarlet Pimpernel fame, being the most notable, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder. Their books were once illumined by flashlights under bed covers so that, late at night, when they were supposed to be asleep, the young male reader could find out what happened next. To do the same with most modern therapeutic fiction would be a waste of batteries.

This is not a romantic discourse on the nature of the boy and how we should leave him to develop on his own, but merely a defense of the idea that he has a nature, and that it should be taken into account in how we deal with him. A necessary part of this (given that this nature doesn’t always lend itself to doing what the dictates of civilization require) is a straightforward and honest discipline, something which too often these days has been replaced by psychotropic drugs.

Boys needs to be tamed, not treated.

But in addition to restraint, a boy needs inspiration. And one way to do this is to give him books that meet him where he is, which is far from the place that most professionals (who are admittedly only trying to help) think he is. In addition, of course, to the great classic hero stories of Homer and Virgil, as well as the various books of the authors I mentioned above, there are lists of books to utilize that predate the Conspiracy Against Boys, in the general order in which they should be read. Here is a short one for beginners. There will be more on Blood & Morality in coming weeks:

• Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and anything else Wilder ever wrote)

• The Jack Tales, by Richard Chase

• Call it Courage, by Armstrong Sperry

• Robin Hood, by Roger Lancelyn Green

• King Arthur, by Roger Lancelyn Green

• Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Gray

• Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

• Lost in the Barrens, by Farley Mowat (and anything else Mowat ever wrote)

• Goodbye Kate, by Billy C. Clark (and anything else Clark ever wrote)

• The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare

• The Mask of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley (and the rest of the Zorro books)

• The Scarlet Pimpernel and El Dorado, by Baroness Orczy (and the rest of the Scarlet Pimpernel books)

• Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle (and anything else Pyle ever wrote)

• Shane, by Jack Shaeffer

• The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien

• Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

• Old Squire’s Farm, by C. A. Stephens

• Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

• The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, by Allan French

• Little Britches, by Ralph Moody

• Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

• A Texas Ranger, by N. A. Jennings

• Penrod, by Booth Tarkington

• The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling

• Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

• The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Edison

• The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tell your boy to read them. And when you send him to bed, tell him to go to sleep—but make sure there are plenty of flashlight batteries within easy reach.

Just in case he needs them.