I'm surprised by many of the titles on the list. I'm with you, Virginia. I'm more concerned about elementary kids being exposed to age-appropriate topics. And some of those decisions may vary, depending on your child. When I first started reading the Harry Potter series to my kids, we had to take a break when the ghosts at the Halloween party got too scary. And even when we picked the series up later, they were very upset when major characters died.
We're currently reading book 3. I thought my son would have trouble with the spiders in book 2 because he has a fear of spiders (like Ron), but we had just watched Hobbit (movie 2, which has large spiders), so he did okay. We'll see how he does with the Dementors (coming up in the next chapter). He's also had some fears of ghosts since watching Ghostbusters this summer (not my decision), but he did okay with the Nearly-Headless Nick's deathday party. They didn't like that I put a scary tone for the voice only Harry could hear. So, to make it less terrifying, they asked me to read it as if it were a little girl's voice.
Personally, I thought that made it more scary, but they just giggled themselves silly with me saying "Kill! Kill! Kill!" in a happy, little girl's voice. Yep. I'm scarring them for life. Oh, dear.
Some co-starring characters were killed off in the Percy Jackson series, which worried me, but my kids seemed to do okay. Maybe it's because they've dealt with the death of both of my husband's parents (and a cat). Then, again, they freaked out about the lion's death in the Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. I guess it depends on how it is handled. I thought the description in the LWW was too graphically detailed (as was the murder scene in Tom Sawyer) which could be why they had more trouble with it.
