NPR's Top Teen Books...

More than 75,000 ballots were cast in the annual NPS summer reader's survey which has given us this list of the 100 Best Ever Teen Novels... and again I ask you: 

How many have you read?  

Which is your favorite?  

Is your favorite not on this list?  Tell us!!

1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling

2. The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins

3. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

4. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

5. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

6. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

7. The Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien

8. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

9. Looking for Alaska, by John Green

10. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

11. The Giver (series), by Lois Lowry

12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series), by Douglas Adams

13. The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton

14. Anne of Green Gables (series), by Lucy Maud Montgomery

15. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman

16. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky

17. The Princess Bride, by William Golding

18. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

19. Divergent (series), by Veronica Roth

20. Paper Towns, by John Green

21. The Mortal Instruments (series), by Cassandra Clare

22. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green

23. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes

24. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

25. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

26.Speak, by Laurie HalseAnderson

27. Twilight (series), by Stephenie Meyer

28. Uglies (series), by Scott Westerfeld

29. The Infernal Devices (series), by Cassandra Clare

30. Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt

31.The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by ShermanAlexie

32. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (series), by Anne Brashares

33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

34. Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green, David Levithan

35. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous

36. Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones

37. Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli

38.A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

39. Vampire Academy (series), by Richelle Mead

40. Abhorsen Trilogy / Old Kingdom Trilogy (series), by Garth Nix

41. Dune, by Frank Herbert

42. Discworld / Tiffany Aching (series, by Terry Pratchett

43. My Sister's Keeper, by Jodi Picoult

44. The Dark is Rising (series), by Susan Cooper

45. Graceling (series), Kristin Cashore

46. Forever..., by Judy Blume

47. Earthsea (series), by Ursula K. Le Guin

48. Inheritance Cycle (series), by Christopher Paolini

49. The Princess Diaries (series), by Meg Cabot

50. The Song of the Lioness (series), by Tamora Pierce

51. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

52. Delirium (series), by Lauren Oliver

53. Anna and the French Kiss, by Stephanie Perkins

54. Hush, Hush Saga (series), by Stephanie Perkins

55. 13 Little Blue Envelopes, by Maureen Johnson

56. It's Kind of a Funny Story, by Ned Vizzini

57. The Gemma Doyle Trilogy (series), by Libba Bray

58. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs

59. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

60. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury

61. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier

62. Just Listen, by Sarah Dessen

63. A Ring of Endless Light, by Madeleine L'Engle

64. The Truth About Forever, by Sarah Dessen

65. The Bartimaeus Trilogy (series), by Jonathan Stroud

66. Bloodlines (series), by Richelle Mead

67. Fallen (series), by Lauren Kate

68. House of Night (series), by P.C. Cast, Kristin Cast

69. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

70. Nick& Norah's Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn, David Levithan

71. Before I Fall, by Lauren Oliver

72. Unwind, by Neal Shusterman

73. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle

74. The Maze Runner Trilogy (series), by James Dashner

75. If I Stay, by Gayle Forman

76. The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley

77. Crank (series), by Ellen Hopkins

78. Matched (series), by Allie Condie

79. Gallagher Girls (series), by Ally Carter

80. The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale

81. Daughter of the Lioness / Tricksters (series), by Tamora Pierce

82. I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak

83. The Immortals (series), by Tamora Pierce

84. The Enchanted Forest Chronicles (series), by Patricia C. Wrede

85. Chaos Walking (series), by Patrick Ness

86. Circle of Magic (series), by Tamora Pierce

87. Daughter of Smoke & Bone, by Laini Taylor

88. Feed, by M.T. Anderson

89. Weetzie Bat (series), by Francesca Lia Block

90. Along for the Ride, by Sarah Dessen

91. Confessions of Georgia Nicolson (series), by Louise Rennison

92. Leviathan (series), by Scott Westerfeld

93. The House of the Scorpion, by Scott Westerfeld

94. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci (series), by Diana Wynne Jones

95. The Lullaby, by Sarah Dessen

96. Gone (series), by Michael Grant

97. The Shiver Trilogy (series), by Maggie Stiefvater

98. The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley

99. Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson

100. Betsy-Tacy Books (series), by Maud Hart Lovelace

What would I add to this list?!  Without a doubt, the Jessica Darling series!  Megan McCafferty has created one of my favorite characters (Marcus Flutie) and perhaps my favorite series of all time--adult or teen fiction!

how many have you read?!?

The BBC believes that most people will have only read 6 of these 100 books... how many of these titles have you read?  I'm going to count and leave a comment, you should let me know how many you've read too!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read some, but not others...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

2012 Pultizers

The Pulitzer Prizes were recently awarded and here is a list of the winners:

GEORGE F. KENNAN : AN AMERICAN LIFE by John Lewis Gaddis (biography)

LIFE ON MARS by Tracy K Smith (poetry)

MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION by Manning Marable (history)

SILENT NIGHT: OPERA IN TWO ACTS by Kevin Puts (music)

THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN by Stephen Greenblatt (general non-fiction)

WATER BY THE SPOONFUL by Quiara Alegria Hudes (drama)

can you tell me what category wasn't awarded this year? 

need more dystopia?

dystopia:  an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives... kind of like Panem in The Hunger Games


Here are a few other books that are set in dystopian societies
1984 by George Orwell
A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Enclave by Ann Aguirre
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
Gone by Michael Grant
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
Incarceron by Catherine Fisher
Incarnate by Jodi Meadows
Legend by Marie Lu
Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
The Maze Runner (trilogy) by James Dasher
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Shatter Me by Tahareh Mafi
The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Unwind by Neal Shusterman


do you have a favorite?  leave us a comment...

the oscars were a few weeks ago...

... but do you know how many Oscar-nominated movies came from books?!  just a few are listed here...

127 Hours by Aron Ralston (starring James Franco, 2010)

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (starring David Niven, 1956)

Atonement by Ian McEwan (starring Keira Knightley, 2007)

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (starring Russell Crowe, 2001)

The Blind Side by Michael Lewis (starring Sandra Bullock, 2009)

The Bridge on the River Kwai by Pierra Boulle (starring William Holden, 1957)

The Cider House Rules by John Irving (starring Tobey Maguire, 1999)

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (starring Jude Law, 2003)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald (starring Brad Pitt, 2008)

Dances with Wolves by Michael Blake (starring Kevin Costner, 1990)

The Descendants by Kuai Hart Hemmings (starring George Clooney, 2011)

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (starring Omar Sharif, 1965)

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (starring Ellen Burstyn, 1973)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (starring Thomas Horn, 2011)

Forest Gump by Winston Groom (starring Tom Hanks, 1994)

The French Connection by Robin Moore (starring Gene Hackman, 1971)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (starring Burt Lancaster, 1953)

Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury (starring Leonardo DiCaprio, 2002)

The Godfather by Mario Puzo (starring Marlon Brando, 1972)

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (starring Clark Gable, 1939)

In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (starring Sidney Poitier, 1967)

Kramer vs Kramer by Avery Corman (starring Dustin Hoffman, 1979)

L.A. Confidential by James Ellroy (starring Kevin Spacey, 1997)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (starring Elijah Wood, 2001)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (starring Elijah Wood, 2003)

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien (starring Elijah Wood, 2002)

Gregory Peck and Harper Lee on the set of To Kill A Mockingbird

Master and Commander: the Far 
Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian (starring Russell Crowe, 2003)

Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy (starring Jon Voight, 1969)

Misery by Stephen King (starring  James Caan, 1990)

Moneyball by Michael Lewis (starring Brad Pitt, 2011)

Mystic River by Dennis Lehayne (starring Sean Penn, 2003)

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy (starring Javier Bardem, 2007)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (starring Jack Nicholson, 1975)

Ordinary People by  Judith Guest (starring Mary Tyler Moore, 1980)

Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (starring Meryl Streep, 1985)

Precious by Sapphire, based on the novel Push (starring Gabourey Sidibe, 2009)

Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally (starring Liam Neeson, 1993)

Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand (starring Tobey Maguire, 2003)

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (starring Emma Thompson, 1995)

The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, from the Different Seasons collection of novellas  
(starring Morgan Freeman, 1994)

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (starring Jodie Foster, 1991)

A Single Man by Tom Ford (starring Colin Firth, 2009)

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup (starring Freida Pinto, 2008)

Terms of Endearment by Larry McMurtrey (starring Shirley MacLaine, 1983)

There Will Be Blood by Upton Beall Sinclair, based on the novel Oil (starring Daniel Day-Lewis, 2007)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre (starring Gary Oldman, 2011)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (starring Gregory Peck)

Up in the Air by Walter Kirn (starring George Clooney, 2009)

love stories in book and film...

did you know that some of your favorite movies began as books?  here are a few to try:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M. Cain

The Girl with the Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier

Gigi (novella) - Colette

Prizzi’s Honor - Robert Condon

The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy

Must Love Dogs - Claire Cook

Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote

Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe

Out of Africa - Isak Dineson (Karen Blixen)

Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier

Camille (book: La Dame aux Camelias) - Alexandre Dumas

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The African Queen - C.S. Forester            

Howard’s End - E.M. Forster

A Room With A View - E.M. Forster

Eat, Pray, Love - Elizabeth Gilbert

Princess Bride - William Goldman

To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

The King and I - Anna Leonowens

 

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

What Dreams May Come - Richard Matheson

Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

 

Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternack

Love Story - Erich Segal

Dear John - Nicholas Sparks

The Last Song - Nicholas Sparks

The Lucky One - Nicholas Sparks

Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks

Nights in Rodanthe - Nicholas Sparks

The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks

A Walk to Remembered - Nicholas Sparks

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

The Bridges of Madison County - Robert James Waller

The Graduate - Charles Webb