I'll second your father's recommendation of Kipling. I look forward to reading The Explorer to my son.

There's no sense in going further -- it's the edge of cultivation,"
So they said, and I believed it -- broke my land and sowed my crop --
Built my barns and strung my fences in the little border station
Tucked away below the foothills where the trails run out and stop:

Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated -- so:
"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges --
"Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

As for novels, I recommend John Steinbeck. He'll make you a better person.

How old do you want to get? If you want some of the oldest classics, I'd reccomend:

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Literally the first story we have a written copy of, carved onto clay tablets)

Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey (The first is the classic epic about the Trojan War and Achilles' destructive rage, the second is Odysseus' long strange trip home from the Trojan War and how his family kept a bunch of money-grubbing suitors at bay).

Medea (In which Jason of the Argonauts leaves his first wife for a newer model and a step up the social ladder, and she responds by killing the children they had together and fleeing the country)
Oedipus Rex, aka Oedipus The King (The play from which Freud took the concept of the Oedipal Complex, and totally missed the point of the story in the process).
Antigone (A Greek tragedy about Oedipus' daughter)
Any/All plays by Euripides, particularly The Frogs

Plato's The Apology (Book of philosophy presented as dialogues between Socrates and a bunch of nobles)
Sun Tzu's The Art of War (Every gamer must read this at least once. Every soldier should read it at least twice.)

I'm personally trying to get through The Arabian Nights right now. It's really brutally violent, racist at several points, and has sexual infidelity as an overarching theme. I have the Barnes & Noble leather bound edition, and the translation is kind of dry.

It's the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, I've never read any of his stuff but if you can stand the long descriptions in Tolkien you should be able to forge ahead through the long descriptions in Dickens as well.

Note that if you have an e-reader (or don't mind reading on a computer) then you can find free digital versions of lots of classics at Project Gutenburg.

i do, and i have been looking for some of these there.

A good step on the way to becoming "more well" read would be to learn that there is another word that means "more well", and it is "better".

Also correct: "more well-read"

Eeeewwww... go on, torture the language if you must.

What is wrong with "better read"? It has served perfectly well for centuries.

Actually, I would be quite surprised if "better read" were considered correct. Do you have a reference that specifically states that "well" is to be treated as it would if it stood alone, or a passage that backs up your claim that it has been used for centuries?

"Well-read" functions as a single grammatical unit, specifically an adjective. As such, "well" is not an adverb modifying the verb "read." In general, having an irregular part does no properly make the whole irregular.

"Better read" sounds more like a modern hypercorrection to me.

thanks for all of the great ideas, my son actually already had a copy of 20,000 leagues. so he and i busted that out over the last three days. despite the "radical" views of Nemo. i really, really, appreciated the flawed aspects of the character. granted this translation probably leans a little away from the un happy aspects of the story but it was enjoyable non-the less.

I can easily think of three historical works that are all fascinating reading, but I dunno if I'd recommend them for a 9yo.