I can still remember seeing my daughter's bookshelf with about 30 volumes, mostly by Louis L'Amour, but others also by Max Brand and Zane Gray. I was choosy about what my children read, but I don't remember why, at the time, I thought these books were deserving of my children's attention. Now I know.
It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys.
How many of us remember that the Russians colonized much of the Alaskan coastline in the mid 18th to the mid-19th centuries? Hands please? No one? That's what I thought. That's because we don't teach history anymore. One of the best ways to learn American history is read western novels, particularly those of Louis L'Amour.
Take that contemporary dragon book in your hand right now, set it down, and don't take another look at it until you have completed reading the books on this list of classic fantasy stories. No one should think about reading or writing a modern dragon story (like many boys seem to want to do now) until he has familiarized himself with the greatest stories in the fantasy genre. It'll take him until he is 45 years old to finish them all, of course, and by then he will be fully equipped to write a dragon story, but no longer interested in doing it. Which is just fine. There are way too many modern dragon stories out there anyway.