How reluctant-reader friendly do you find Ender's Game? It's so layered with heavy subjects and philosophy and things. I read it first at sixteen and didn't really like it. (Then I re-read it two years later and fell dizzyingly in love with it, and Speaker for the Dead probably changed my life.) But I've heard a lot of people talk about how much they loved it as much younger children, and I wonder what drew them to it. Of course, I was sort of timid as a younger reader (and I'm still a timid reader in some ways, because books and I get so intimately involved, and so sometimes the wrong book can really hurt me), so that may have had something to do with it?

I've recommended Artemis Fowl to several... well, parents, really, because usually they haven't had their children with them. It hasn't taken thus far, but I hold out hope. (A little boy bought one of the books on his own, too, so yay.)

I read A Wrinkle in Time when I was nine, too, but my reading experience and maturity level was so very different that I don't know what it would mean to other nine-year-olds! I know that it was one of those books that changed my life, though; I felt, reading it, that it was the first "grown-up" book I'd ever read, even though it was a children's book -- it felt so poignant and important and made me feel things I hadn't ever felt before.

I don't know why I didn't think to post to booklisters! *facepalm* Thanks for the reminder.