What I'm Reading: Popular YA Books

It's the final week of my class and our theme this week is "What Teens are Reading Now" - while the obvious answers are Fault in Our Stars and Divergent, I figured I'd try to delve a little deeper to get some ideas for my recommendations this week. I also solicited two of our teenage babysitters so it will be interesting to see how their recommendations align (or not!) with what I find on my own.

Two great lists that helped me this week were Mashable's 12 YA Books for Your 2014 Summer Reading List and Teen Vogue's The 15 Most Exciting YA Books Coming Out This Year (don't judge...I actually found the Teen Vogue list to be a pretty thorough and thoughtful one...who knew?).

I predict I'll be reading much more YA in the coming months...there are so many books that I have come across that I can't wait to dive into!

What I'm Reading: Nutritious Books

What's a Nutritious Book, you ask? Simply put, a YA novel that a teacher could use as part of their curriculum, supporting Common Core standards, etc. As an adult reader, I actually have loved some of the ones I have come across this summer...it's great to feel like I'm actually learning something as I'm reading, and many of them have given me a much greater understanding of a time period or event that I didn't know (or let's be honest, remember) much about before.

ELA and History are definitely the predominant teachers who might be inclined to use YA novels to support their classroom activities, and as it turns out, all of my picks this week have some sort of historical basis. I have to cheat a smidge and include one of the books that I included on one of my midterm reading lists, because I just loved it so much (as much as you can love a Holocaust book, I suppose!). In fact, I really enjoyed three of my recommendations from that list, so I'm including the other 2 as Honorable Mentions, as I didn't think I could get away with recycling all three of my picks!

So, here we go...Nutritious Books for your reading (or teaching) pleasure:

What I'm Reading: Geeky and/or Scary Books

This week is my least favorite genre...and honestly a bit of a letdown after my required romance reading last week! "Geeky" is essentially science-fiction and fantasy (a bit tongue-in-cheek, I think, by my professor) and Scary obviously speaks for itself. Our course this summer is one week shorter than when it runs in either the fall or spring semester, so we were able to choose either Geeky or Scary for the week's assignment. Since my assigned book was in the Geeky category (More Than This by Patrick Ness), I decided to be consistent.

In searching for my books this week, I tended to gravitate towards ones that I might actually be interested in reading. I figure this category is the easiest to get boys interested in so I let myself off the hook. In the comments kicking off our module this week, our professor advised not to shy away from series. Which is good, because all of my choices (unintentionally) are parts of a greater set.

Here we go...