Booklist's 50 Best YA Books of All Time

Just when I think I have some kind of handle on YA comes a list like this from the American Library Association. They say that YA began in 1967 with the publication of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders (and didn't that just leap to the top of my TBR?). This year is of course 50 years on from 1967 and so they are celebrating 50 Years of YA with a fabulous list. It's a very interesting list, and I'm particularly intrigued by the large number of books that I've never even heard of.

1960s

The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton (see my review)

The Earthsea Trilogy - Ursula K. Le Guin 1/3

The Pigman - Paul Zindel

1970s

The Friends - Rosa Guy

A Hero Ain't Nothin' But a Sandwich - Alice Childress

I Know What You Did Last Summer - Lois Duncan

Forever - Judy Blume

Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast - Robin McKinley

Gentlehands - M.E. Kerr

1980s

Homecoming - Cynthia Voigt

Annie on My Mind - Nancy Garden

Sweet Valley High series - Francine Pascal 181

Singularity - William Sleator

How's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones

Fallen Angels - Walter Dean Myers

Dangerous Angels series - Francesca Lia Block

1990s

The Silver Kiss - Annette Curtis Klause

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes - Chris Crutcher

Toning the Sweep - Angela Johnson

The Lesser Blessed - Richard Van Camp

The Circuit books - Francisco Jiménez

The Facts Speak for Themselves - Brock Cole

Tenderness - Robert Cormier

2000s

Kit's Wilderness - David Almond

Miracle's Boys - Jacqueline Woodson

Hole in My Life - Jack Gantos

33 Snowfish - Adam Rapp

How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff (see my review)

Black Juice - Margo Lanagan

Looking for Alaska - John Green

American Born Chinese - Gene Luen Yang

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing series - M.T. Anderson

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie (see my review)

Boy Toy - Barry Lyga

The Chaos Walking trilogy - Patrick Ness

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow

Living Dead Girl - Elizabeth Scott

Nation - Terry Pratchett

Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith - Deborah Heiligman

The Monstrumologist series - Rick Yancey 

Wintergirls - Laurie Halse Anderson

2010s

They Called Themselves the K.K.K. : The Birth of an American Terrorist Group - Susan Campbell Bartoletti

The Watch That Ends the Night: Voices from the Titanic - Allan Wolf

The Raven Cycle series - Maggie Stiefvater 

Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell

March series - John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, Nate Powell (illustrator)

Midwinter blood - Marcus Sedgwick

A Volcano Beneath the Snow: John Brown's War against Slavery - Albert Marrin

I Crawl Through It - A.S. King

Out of Darkness - Ashley Hope Pérex

3/50 

Or actually 3 of about 200, given that there were 181 books in the Sweet Valley High series, all of which remain unread by me.

I can't really expect my tally to be much higher given that I hadn't actually ever heard of 32 of these books. Nor have I heard of many of the authors, some are very famous of course and I may have read other books just not the ones listed here. 

July 2017 4/50