Summer Reading
LINKS to book lists
Here are some links provided by Voice of Youth Advocates. Their website is at http://www.voya.com/ These guys are thinking like you guys, and you’ll like these links, I bet.
Overbooked: Young Adult Literature. Reviews books. Cool books that hook you on wanting to read. She describes: short stories, fantasy, suspense and even tearjerkers. Links to other sites’ lists. Great starting point in your search for good reading. http://www.overbooked.org/genres/youth/yalit.htmlReading Rants: Out-of-the-Ordinar y Teen Booklists! New books galore. Books for teens & for adults that will capture teen interest. Plus author interiews, media tie-ins, and online book discussion guides. http://tln.lib.mi.us/~amutch/jen
Teenreads.com: http://www.teenreads.com
Teens Top Ten : http://www.ala.org/teenstopten Young adult titles voted most popular each year by teen readers, also-rans (that you might also like) & tips on how to uncover a good read.
LINKS TO READING LISTS I LIKE
Arrowhead Library’s College-bound List. This is a comprehensive list organized by type. It includes world literature, poetry, and great books that every educated person should read. http://als.lib.wi.us/Collegebound.html
A reading list for Middle-Schoolers. All in red. These are wonderful books, for middle-schoolers of all ages. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Estates/4967/middle.html
American Library Association. (their website is at http://www.ala.org/). This list also has a lot of books I love. It is very nicely divided into categories, and most important of all, it tells how many pages! http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/alscresources/booklists/MiddleSchoolReads.cfm
book list – no clicking required.
(This list is also from VOYA, and it is not just the same old stuff . It even has graphic novels!)
REMARKABLE TEENS
Death Be Not Proud. by John Gunther. (This deeply moving book is a father’s memoir of his brave, intelligent, and spirited son who was seventeen years old when he died of a brain tumor.)
Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter. by Adeline Yen Mah. (After Mah’s mother’s death, Mah’s father remarries and moves the family to Shanghai to evade the Japanese during World War II, but Mah and her siblings are relegated to second-class status by their stepmother.)
The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story. by Ken Silverstein. This Boy Scout was building a homemade nuclear reactor in his backyard until the Environmental Protection Agency buried his lab at a radioactive dump site.
REAL PEOPLE
Lakota Woman by Mary Brave Bird. During the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee that ended with a bloody assault by U.S. marshals and police, seventeen-year-old Mary Brave Bird gave birth to a son; her own story continues with her marriage to Leonard Crow Dog, medicine man and spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement.
Hole in my Life by Jack Gantos. In this autobiographical sketch of his restless final year of high school, popular young adult novelist Gantos reveals his short-lived career as a drug smuggler and his harrowing time in prison.
The Greatest: Muhammad Ali by Walter Dean Myers. Myers interweaves fight sequences and revelations from the troubled business of boxing with the famous boxer’s life story, set amid the political events and issues of the day.
ME IN THE WORLD
Crackback by John Coy. Always a starter on his high school football team, Miles changes his life’s direction after a new coach takes over.
Breathing Underwater by Alex Flinn. After hitting his girlfriend, Caitlin, sixteen-year-old Nick is sent to counseling and ordered to keep a journal where he examines his controlling behavior and anger.
Pedro and Me by Judd Winick. An AIDS educator when the author met him on the Real World television show, Pedro taught Judd about friendship, dying, surviving a friend’s death, and the importance of telling Pedro’s story in this graphic novel.
THE NATURAL WORLD
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. As Bryson and Katz haul their out-of-shape, middle-aged butts over hill and dale, the reader is treated to a very personal memoir and a delightful chronicle of the trail, the people who created it, and the places it passes through.
The Race to Save the Lord God Bird by Philip Hoose. Artists, collectors, ornithologists, scientists, and political activists all play a part in this compelling story of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the first modern endangered species.
Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. When a Nantucket whale ship sinks after being rammed twice by an angry whale, will the young sailors survive the icy waters?
OTHER WORLDS
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. An expert at war games, young Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is recruited for Battle School, to train for encounters with invading aliens.
Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. In the distant future when cities move about and devour smaller towns, Tom is almost killed by the man he most admires.
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Two short novels (with The Island of Dr. Moreau) portray a nightmare future world where humanity’s worst instincts have evolved into something truly grotesque.
STORIES OF SURVIVAL
It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong. This autobiography of the famed multiple winner of the Tour de France bicycle race explores Armstrong’s grueling trip back to championship riding after nearly dying of cancer.
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult. All her life, thirteen-year-old Anna has donated platelets, blood, and bone marrow to lengthen her sister Kate’s life-until she hires a lawyer for a medical emancipation lawsuit to give her control over her own body.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Speigelman. A noted cartoonist deftly translates his father’s Holocaust survival story into this exceptional graphic novel in which Jews are mice and Germans are cats.
UNDERSTANDING THE MIDDLE EAST
Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq by Riverbend. Actual postings from a blog by Riverbend, the pseudonym of a young woman in Baghdad, reveal her attempts to live a normal life in a war zone after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, from April 2003 to September 2004.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution appears in graphic novel format.
Under the Persimmon Tree by Suzanne Fisher Staples. During the war in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, a twelve-year-old girl who has lost her family finds courage and comfort when her life intersects with an American- Muslim teacher, the wife of an Afghan doctor.
THE WORLD BEYOND HIGH SCHOOL
Catalyst by Laurie Halse Anderson. Super-achiever Kate is sure that her life depends on getting into her top college, MIT, until a neighbor’s tragedy forces her to look outside herself.
Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Went Out into the Real World by Maria Shriver. Expanded from a college commencement speech, this little book by television anchorwoman Shriver (also wife of California’s famous bodybuilding governor) offers etertaining lessons about life and the importance of laughter.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Journalist Ehrenreich learns firsthand what it’s like to earn minimum wage as one of America’s working poor, by moving from Maine to Minnesota to Florida and cleaning hotel rooms, waitressing, providing home health care, and working in Wal-Mart.
WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. This chronicle of a football season in Odessa, Texas, explores the role of high school sports in America and how they can bring communities together-and tear them apart.
Offsides by Erik Esckilsen. When Tom Gray, a Mohawk Indian and star soccer player, moves to a new high school, he refuses to play for its soccer team because of their offensive Warrior mascot.
Ultimate Sports: Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults edited by Donald R. Gallo. Sixteen short stories about teenage athletes are written by well-known authors including Robert Lipsyte and Chris Crutcher.
MYSTERIOUS HAPPENINGS
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Famous detective Sherlock Holmes investigates the tale of a hound that haunts the lonely moors around the Baskervilles’ ancestral home.
The Borden Tragedy by Rick Geary. The puzzle of who really killed Lizzie Borden’s parents has fascinated people for more than one hundred years; cartoonist Geary reports various theories and shows how plausible-or not-each one might be.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. At fifteen, autistic math genius Christopher Boone discovers the dead body of his neighbor’s dog and determines to find the killer in this funny, sad, and totally convincing tale.
