Learning to read well is more like cooking a steak than you might imagine. A great chef can have the best set of knives and the most expensive pots and pans, but even if he pulls off the perfect medium-rare it isn’t going to matter if you started him off with a dollar-store patty. And even if a kid knows his ABCs, and has worked hard on being able to sound out the toughest words, if all he has around him are the same 10 Captain Underpants comics he rips through each night, he isn’t going to turn into a good reader.

So whether you’re cooking or booking, it needs to start with good ingredients.

There are more than a million books published in English each year, and it’s a task to hunt down the very few good ones. Secular libraries and bookstores won’t help – they’re the ones pushing trash on our kids. There are a lot of conservative and Christian review sites, but too often they’re reviewing what’s new or what’s popular, whether it’s good or not.

RP’s Recommended Reads is focused only on what’s awesome. We’ve got hundreds of suggestions, covering all ages and interests.

Some are important and even life-changing, while others are simply light-hearted entertainment. Both sorts are good, it’s just the former is like meat – we need it in our diet – while the second is akin to candy, which can be a delight and a joy, but we’ll get unhealthy fast if we turn it into our major food group. When we do pass along a chocolate-brownie-with-a-dollop-of-moosetracks-ice-cream-on-top suggestion, you can be sure it’s going to be amazing, and you shouldn’t be surprised if it also happens to have some vitamins packed in there somewhere too.

Even among the best books, some are still going to be better than others. That’s why, moving forward, we’re going to give a rating for most of the books we review, and it isn’t going to be a star system, or a one thumb vs. two thumbs up kind of thing. I’ve settled on three categories, and there’s a sense in which these could be divided into could, should, and must reads. Or the three categories could be understood as books worth borrowing, buying, or giving.

The point is, these are all good books, so that’s where the scale starts, going up from there, from good to great and finally to gift.

These ratings will be applied to all children and teen books, and adult biographies and fiction too, but not adult non-fiction. There a book’s value is often tied to its utility or usefulness for a specific audience so a generalized rating doesn’t work well.

Good

Some books are entertaining, but maybe not important. These could be kids’ picture books that they’ll enjoy for a time, or maybe a geo-political thriller that dad will find just perfect for the beach. But they aren’t the sort of books you want to get stuck in, rereading again and again, because they just aren’t worth that sort of investment. It’s the sort you might borrow from the library rather than buy: plenty of adventure, bright, hilarious, and safe – none of that modern-day weird stuff – but not the sort that needs to be passed through the generations.

These could still make for fantastic purchases for a Christian school library, for all the kids who just rip through one book after another and the librarians just can’t keep ahead of ’em. But there’s plenty of even better books you’d get first for your home library, which is going to be more selective, stocked with the books you want them paging through repeatedly.

Great

Here we’re getting into books that are going to be read by multiple members of your family, and it just makes sense to have your own copy then. Or we’re talking about books that really should be read, for whatever reason – maybe to refine the palette, teach what the world’s really like, or just generally make one literate. They are worth buying to always have on hand.

Gift

Finally, we’ve got books that really must be read. We’re talking the kind of novel your spouse doesn’t need to read because you just had to share this great bit and that, until finally by book’s end you’ve read the whole thing to her. It’s the book you want everyone in your company to read so you bought it by the pallet. It’s one your kids aren’t allowed to move out of the house until they’ve read it. And even if your grandkids are far on the horizon yet, you already know what they’ll be getting from you for at least one of their birthdays. It’s the book you always have a spare copy on hand, in your car glove compartment, just in case you meet someone who hasn’t read it yet. It’s that book.

There aren’t a lot of this sort, but these rare gems will make for the perfect gift, whether for birthdays, or just because.