YA Literature, Summer 2008

It's time to select books for my summer courses, and I've just made my list of books we'll read. The problem is that there's probably too much on it! I've selected a dozen books, some of which are really fast reads, some of which will take longer. Since I'm including Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief at 576 pages, I guess I really should reduce the rest of the list--but what shall I cut? Right now my list looks like this:

• Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
• Julia Alvarez, Before We Were Free
• Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
• M. T. Anderson, Feed
• Nikki Grimes, Dark Sons
• Angela Johnson, The First Part Last
• Chris Lynch, Inexcusable
• Walter Dean Myers, Monster
• An Na, A Step from Heaven
• Virginia Euwer Wolff, True Believer
• Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese

And of course The Book Thief. This list is, clearly, multicultural and gender-balanced in terms of protagonists and authors, and it includes a range of genres, styles, and significant issues. All of the books are award winners or honorably mentioned.

It gets harder and harder to limit my list, because every time I teach this course, there are more wonderful books that I want to include. Some of the students who take this class plan to teach. If more of the students were preservice teachers, I might select more YA "classics." But many students who enroll are taking this to meet a gen ed literature requirement. For this population, I want to select themes, characters, settings, styles, and genre experiments that will stretch them as readers. At the same time, I want to say, "Look what's new in YA lit since you were in middle school!" And I want to say, "Try on this protagonist's point of view for a while, and see what it means to live as an immigrant or as a child of divorce or as a victim of poverty or discrimination or abuse. I want them to see hope and courage and humor in confronting some of the many challenges that contemporary teens face. Above all, I want them to get caught up in "good reads," and all of these books have proved satisfying, for me at least!

I just checked online reader reviews of The Book Thief, and they are stellar. Still, I could substitute the much shorter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon or Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. Uh oh! I've done it now! I'm starting to think about substituting Blankets by Craig Thompson for another book on my list or Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon or Looking for Alaska by John Green or . . . and so it goes. This is why I struggle so with choosing books--so many utterly wonderful books for young adults on the market now.