My brother teaches 11-12 y.o. and the school libraries here being rather pathetic, he's selected a hundred books from his collection (he counts series like HP as one book, serials as multiple books) got them bound and set up his own in his class. He has since added 150 more titles.

He turns his biggest readers into "librarians" (they manage the loans and advise) and devotes the last hour on fridays to a kind of book club activity, ie: those who want to present the books they read to others, some write appreciations/critics and everyone who wants to get to pick a new book (they can also pick more on any day, if they're there, and not on a waiting list). It's a lot of management but he has a lot of success with it.

I sent him your list. He thinks 50 books/year is a great deal too many for most, only the top fourth of his students reach (or exceed - a few almost double it) that number, the average is more around 25 (and the lower fourth read an average of 10 books during the year). He thinks on average the kids are too slow readers to afford to read a book a week, and they don't have (nor should have) that much time to read.

About the selection it's quite different, in part because we're francophones, but about 25% of those books are in his library (Dahl, Gaiman, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Laura Ingalls, Tolkien (he has LOTR too, though), Colfer, Rowling, Pullman, Snicket, Twain, Funke and others).

He finds the list runs too heavily in Fantasy/magic. He's limited it to 25%. He finds it lacking in the mystery genre, as well as in the more "realistic" stories. He has a much higher percentage of novels in historical settings (He places anything from Ann of Green Gables/Little House to The Three Musketeers and a few of the Verne titles in that category), and he has many graphic novels and "comics" (ie: bande dessinée - French/Belgian classics and more unusual stuff), and some "interactive books". What surprised him most about the list is how anglo-saxon centric it is (and too many Dahl to his taste). 40% of his books are written in French, 30% are from the UK/USA (in translation, of course) and 30% are a selection of youth literature from around the world - to open the kids up to other culture and stimulate their curiosity for them. The numbers might a bit skewed, because he has 30 books of non-fiction throw in.

A few anglo-saxon titles he found curiously absent? A few of the easiest Agatha Christie, some Stephen King, Miéville's Un Lun Dun, Swift.

Personally I guess I'm not really a reference, as I devoured books as a kid. At 11-12 I read LOTR (tried the Hobbit afterward and hated it), was heavily into Dumas, Hugo and absolutely loved Clavell's Shogun, on the heels of the TV series I watched with dad It was also probably around that time (maybe a year later, two max - it was a bit before the miniseries) that I read the Winds of War. I was a huge fan of Stephen King too, couldn't wait for my mom to finish them so I could read them before she brought them back to the library (that would be the years of Shining, Carrie, Cujo, Christine and later Pet Cemeterary etc.). I was also going through whatever I could find (incl. the Shere Hite report, before mom saw me and put it under lock!), like my dad's Ludlum or Colleen McCullough, some of my mom's Pasternaks. Before 15 y.o., during a rainy summer I went through my dad's old school books (that included the few Dumas and Hugo I was given at 11, when I got sick and went to live with grandma for a few weeks), so Flaubert (not The Red and the Black, that was on the index in his time), Stendhal, Zola, Maupassant, Balzac, Claudel etc.

Personally I would have liked to see a few Verne on the list (through personally I read Verne ealier than 11 y.o.)