Top books for teens

I remember going through this whole song and dance here about book recommendations, on the presumption that boys don’t read as much as girls, and we needed some good books for these poor also-rans. It’s disappeared in the wash of old ideas versus new ideas, but the issue probably hasn’t gone away. In the list of who reads what, the numbers are something like this:

Vast Majority - People who don’t read books at all
Six percent of the population – Females who read books regularly
Four percent of the population – Males who read books regularly

I got the idea of ten percent of the people as being readers from Isaac Asimov, who gave us a talk once in my previous DJ advising us not to bemoan that most people don’t read, because most people have never read. It takes under a hundred thousand copies to get a book on the bestseller lists, at least for a moment. The biggest bestsellers of all sell maybe a couple of million copies. There’s maybe 250 million people in the country who could read, if they wanted to. They really don’t want to.

One holds out hope, in any case, at least for the younger generation who may not have the habit of reading, that somehow they will acquire it. To get to that point, they need books they want to read. NPR recently did a poll of the top hundred books for teens, and I have to say, it’s a list of books that are pretty appealing, for the most part. There are some overlaps with the lists I’ve seen from schools of suggested summer reading, but not a lot. And certainly the emphasis is on modern stories, which is probably a good thing for less practiced readers. I mean, Dickens is a hard sell no matter how good he is, and we need to face that reality. (And we need to not worry; eventually the real readers in the group will also think that Bleak House is as good as it gets.)

Anyhow, if you’re looking for a good book, check out the Top 100 Teen Books. After all, Something Wicked This Way Comes is the other Bradbury book on the list. Nothing wrong with that.
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