Rudyard Kipling Books Free Online: All 6, in the Order to Read Them
Kipling is the most awkward great writer in children's literature, and pretending otherwise makes for useless reading advice. He wrote the best animal stories in the language and the best novel ever written about India by an Englishman, and he was an imperialist who wrote "The White Man's Burden" and meant it. Both facts are load-bearing. What follows says which book is which, and where the trouble is, because a parent handing over Kim deserves to know what is in it.
Six of his books are free to read in the library.
Start youngest: Just So Stories
- Just So Stories (1902) — how the whale got his throat, how the camel got his hump, the elephant's child and the insatiable curiosity. Written to be read aloud, and one of the very few books where that is literally true: the rhythms are built for a speaking voice, the repeated phrases are cues, and a reader who does the voices is doing what the text asks. Best of the twelve is "The Cat That Walked by Himself", which is about domestication and is quietly the wisest thing he wrote. Ages four and up, and it does not matter which order the stories come in.
Two caveats for this one specifically. "How the Leopard Got His Spots" contains an "Ethiopian" whose skin colour is the joke, and there is casual period racial framing elsewhere in the collection. Read a story ahead of time rather than sight-reading it to a child.
The Mowgli books
- The Jungle Book (1894) — three Mowgli stories and four unrelated ones, which surprises everyone who arrives from the film. "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi" — a mongoose against two cobras in a bungalow garden — is in here and is the best short story in the book. The Mowgli material is nothing like the cartoon: the Law of the Jungle is genuinely lawful, Shere Khan is beaten by strategy rather than courage, and the end of Mowgli's time with the wolves is sad.
- The Second Jungle Book (1895) — more Mowgli, and better Mowgli. "Red Dog" and "The Spring Running" are the strongest things in either volume, and "The King's Ankus" is a small perfect story about greed. Read this immediately after the first; the two are one book split by a publisher.
Both work read aloud from about six, and are on the list in read-aloud chapter books that actually work out loud. Both are also, unmistakably, books about a boy who is naturally superior to the animals and the villagers around him, and that is not accidental.
The novel: Kim
- Kim (1901) — an orphan of Irish parentage running loose in Lahore, who attaches himself to a Tibetan lama on a pilgrimage and is simultaneously recruited into British intelligence. It is the best thing Kipling wrote and one of the great novels of the road: the Grand Trunk Road sequence, with its crowds and carts and holy men and horse-traders, is as alive as anything in Dickens. Twelve and up, and adults who bounced off Kipling as children should start here rather than with the animals.
The politics are inseparable from the pleasure. The Great Game is presented as an adventure with the British as the natural custodians of India, and Kim's ability to pass as an Indian boy is the novel's engine. It is also written with more affection and specific knowledge of Indian life than almost any English novel of its century. Both things at once, and Kim is the book most worth arguing with. It appears among the orphan novels in classic orphan stories free online, where it is by far the odd one out.
The English history pair
- Puck of Pook's Hill (1906) — two children in a Sussex meadow accidentally summon Puck, who brings them people out of English history to tell their own stories: a Roman centurion on the Wall, a Norman knight, a Renaissance craftsman. The device is a frame for the best short historical fiction he wrote, and the centurion stories are superb.
- Rewards and Fairies (1910) — the sequel, same children, same method, and the one containing "If—". Slightly darker and slightly better in places.
These two are the least read Kipling and the most rewarding surprise for a child who likes history. Ten and up. They need some English geography to land, and they are wonderful if it does.
What is not here
Captains Courageous, Stalky & Co., The Man Who Would Be King and the collected verse are not in the library yet. Captains Courageous is the absence a reader will feel first, since it is the natural next step after the Mowgli books.
The order, in one line
Just So Stories → The Jungle Book → The Second Jungle Book → Puck of Pook's Hill → Kim.
On the discomfort: the argument for reading him with children anyway is that the empire is in these books openly rather than hidden, which makes them unusually easy to talk about. The argument against is that a young child takes the frame along with the story. Both are honest positions. What is not honest is presenting him as a straightforward classic and letting a reader discover it unaccompanied.
More of the shelf in classic adventure novels free online, the animal stories continue in nature study and living books about real animals, and everything of his is on his author page.