'Best ever' teen novels?
Jul. 27th, 2012 05:15 pmMy friend ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mokatiki sent me this link : the NPR (whatever that is) got a list of 235 great YA books, and they're going to narrow them to 100 using our votes. These things are always terribly arbitrary, but I was encouraged, actually, by the quality of the list. For every The Inheritance trilogy (THE WORST) there are ten excellent nominations - and these were all sent in by readers too.
You get to vote for a maximum of ten from the list. I went with:
Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden
The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones
Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Graceling (series) by Kristin Cashore
I'd be curious to hear about your choices :) Mine HURT me. I'm still not sure about The Year of Secret Assignments vs Lord of the Flies... I'm don't generally think of myself as a big YA person, but I am a big fantasy person and a big kidlit person so obviously there's overlap.
It's a very American list - not only in the obvious stuff (I didn't read The Year of Secret Assignments, I read Finding Cassie Crazy.) Two of my votes were books I read for the Children's Literature module I did at uni - which was run by an American. And there were other books from that course on the list too. I sort of assumed she'd set us some fairly obscure books that exemplified particular types of book she wanted us to read, but now I think probably it was just that American YA classics are more different from the British ones than I'd expect.
Certainly I can't imagine a British list like this lacking Goodnight Mister Tom.
mokatiki sent me this link : the NPR (whatever that is) got a list of 235 great YA books, and they're going to narrow them to 100 using our votes. These things are always terribly arbitrary, but I was encouraged, actually, by the quality of the list. For every The Inheritance trilogy (THE WORST) there are ten excellent nominations - and these were all sent in by readers too.You get to vote for a maximum of ten from the list. I went with:
Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden
The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones
Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Year of Secret Assignments by Jaclyn Moriarty
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Graceling (series) by Kristin Cashore
I'd be curious to hear about your choices :) Mine HURT me. I'm still not sure about The Year of Secret Assignments vs Lord of the Flies... I'm don't generally think of myself as a big YA person, but I am a big fantasy person and a big kidlit person so obviously there's overlap.
It's a very American list - not only in the obvious stuff (I didn't read The Year of Secret Assignments, I read Finding Cassie Crazy.) Two of my votes were books I read for the Children's Literature module I did at uni - which was run by an American. And there were other books from that course on the list too. I sort of assumed she'd set us some fairly obscure books that exemplified particular types of book she wanted us to read, but now I think probably it was just that American YA classics are more different from the British ones than I'd expect.
Certainly I can't imagine a British list like this lacking Goodnight Mister Tom.
