Mensa Excellence in Reading list, grades 9 to 12

The Mensa Foundation's Excellence in Reading Program gives children and teenagers a printed reading list for their age, to check off book by book with the date and a star rating, and an adult signs to confirm the whole list has been read unabridged. It is free, needs no registration and is open to readers anywhere. The list for grades 9 to 12 is the longest and most demanding, 116 titles running from Homer, Virgil and Dante through Austen, Dickens and the Brontës to twentieth-century American novels, plays and memoirs.

For a collector the list is a tour of the great firsts. Several of its American classics appeared first in London: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published by Chatto and Windus in December 1884, ahead of the American edition, and Moby-Dick came out in London as The Whale, from Richard Bentley in 1851, weeks before Harper's New York edition. The Great Gatsby (Scribner, 1925) is collected for its jacket as much as the book, and The Lord of the Rings was published by Allen and Unwin in three volumes in 1954 and 1955.

The copy a teenager reads for the list is a modern paperback worth very little. Each row links to the book's page, where the first edition is identified against two sources where we have them, its points are listed, and a value band appears once we hold recorded sales of that printing.