I would recommend the website Royalroad https://www.royalroad.com/home. It has a ton of stories by amateur authors. They're not enriching, deep, or social commentary. It's a modern version of pulp magazines, in the vein of Conan the Barbarian with worse writing, but in the end those were published in a paid magazine, while this is a free website accessible to all.

While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.

There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.

If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.

I have a 12 year old daughter and 10 year old son. My daughter has been reading voraciously since about 9 years old. This past summer she plowed through several 800-1000 page books.

My son is not nearly as voracious as she is, but has, in the past 6 months started to really value his reading time, enough that he gets upset when things interfere with it. Also, he now goes out and researches books to read (often via YouTube during his Youtube time). I think what got him here was consistency.

We've read to them every night until they were in second grade and then required them to read overnight. It took a while to take hold with both, but once it did they dove in and now really value it.

As for what he is reading - Diary of a wimpy kid series, Percy Jackson, Mysterious Benedict Society are the current favorites.

These are fairly current: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Rider. Aimed at teenage boys although I only know about them cos our daughter loved 'em.

I have both (10-13ish) and both read almost constantly. Our son is the older one, read early and also very quickly, and that's set a tone for his siblings who now read a lot as well. Neither in that 10-13 age bracket above has trouble finding novels they enjoy from fantasy or adventure settings. There was an earlier period where we asked friends' teenagers to suggest book series, but these days our children seem to find their own novels during library sessions incorporated into their schooling.

I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.

A mother I know said the same thing about reading assignments at school, that they're all for girls now.

Having a female protagonist doesn't necessarily mean boys can't enjoy a book, of course. I (a boy) enjoyed Nancy Drew just as much as The Hardy Boys when I was young. But I suspect modern writings with girl protagonists are more focused on targeting girls than on making good stories that happen to feature girls, and may not be as universally enjoyable.

No, we just have the one daughter. But I was a boy, and I loved reading too. I don't remember needing books to mirror my experience, in fact I probably preferred books which didn't since I mostly found my own experience fairly boring!

Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:

1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.

2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.

3. We really liked A Wish in the Dark, by Christina Soontornvat. Some social commentary but also a great story in an interesting world: https://soontornvat.com/books/a-wish-in-the-dark/. I also highly highly recommend All Thirteen, the non-fiction story of the Thai cave rescue, absolutely amazing story: https://soontornvat.com/books/all-thirteen/.

4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.

I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)

I have daughters that love nancy drew novels, read to them before bed, currently on book 28.

for a boy the Hardy boys is the equivalent..

Also depends on the age but other good ones are:

Artemis Fowl Alex Rider Berenstain Bears

Isn't 2020s a pretty steep cutoff? I understand these stories shouldn't be too cut off from the current culture, but surely 10-15 years in the past is still fine? Even older, surely; 2 of the novels that stick out in my own childhood ('Bridge to Terabithia' and 'Where The Red Fern Grows') were decades before me.