Is anyone else a little surprised and/or disappointed that there aren't more YA titles on the summer reading list? While this is an amazing--and eclectic--list of books, it made me wonder if all the great YA literature is still not considered serious, challenging, or engaging reading for the students they were written for. Or if the teachers themselves aren't reading much from the YA world.

Great post, Alison, and it's a terrific list. David's comment is food for thought. It's possible that teachers may not be listing YA books because the genre is already on the student's radar. It would be fascinating to see students counter with a list of their own for teachers to read over the summer.

The whole idea of encouraging readability as well as "growth" is an unusual one; at our store one can read between the lines of the required (of course)selections and get a pretty good fly-on-the-wall impression of school board conversations-for instance, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is always on the list; a badly dated sleeping dart of a book if there ever was one, but Stoker's Dracula, which holds up much better, isn't: It's too Catholic for the born-agains, too Godly for the atheist activists, and of course we don't want to give the Goth kids any ideas... The idea of reading for fun is still struggling to catch on in these parts.

I agree 100% with the first poster. While the format of this list and sentiments of the educators is lovely, its distinct lack of YA is very common in our area as well. There is this somewhat irrational push towards adult fiction that is starting earlier and earlier when it comes to reading lists, even in middle school. Don't kids have the rest of their lives to read THE KITE RUNNER? I fear many of them will miss out on a multitude of phenomenal YA fiction in lieu of Oprah's picks and whatever literary fiction their teachers happened to read last summer. *sigh*

I agree -- I was very rurprised there weren't more YA titles. I think YA has some of the best books being written these days!

I think okate is right in that YA is pretty much self-propelled and doesn't need boosting from schools, also I wouldn't trust most teachers to make a choice there; that'd be like mom picking out your CD collection for you...

It seems that the Weston reading list is a compilation of books that are favorites of the English teachers at Weston High. While Young Adult books
(not a genre, by the way)are probably well-known amongst the high school crowd, it still seems that YA literature is considered sub-par to
that of "intellectual" or "serious" literature. Students should be encouraged to read about people of their own age with whom they may share a variety of experiences or relate to in other ways. YA books can be and should be
an important part of the curriculum too.

Interesting. This is exactly how my college alumnai magazine does faculty reading recommendations.

I started to write a reply to everyone's comments here that grew SO long that I'm just going to have to make a separate post out of it! Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, though, know that I wholeheartedly agree that it would be good to see more YA books on this list and on others like it. From what I've seen, though, most high schools around here (western suburbs of Boston) have been very slow to include recent or current YA books (novels or non-fiction) on their summer reading lists.