Last week, my friend on this site wrote a post that posed the question: what’s next after Twilight? Well, as a guy, I’m pretty much going to say anything (which isn’t exactly true—more about that in a different post, though), but it got me thinking:
While it’s great to look towards the future, I’m curious about our reading pasts.
As such, I decided to throw out this little query to the twitter followers of bantamspectra: What was your favorite YA sci-fi growing up (YA being a rather loose term that I figured would cover both middle-grade and teen offerings—and then realizing almost all my selections were in the middle-grade range)?
The response made me realize I need to read more.
Personally, I had a few favorites in mind when I asked this question, and clearly I was hoping for vindication of my choices. In no particular order:
THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH by Norton Juster—My mother used to make us watch this movie all the time, as it was one of her favorites, and I always used to hate the live-action stuff in the beginning. But the cartoon—the bulk of the movie—really caught my imagination, and when I realized that it was first a book, I was excited. I remember reading this on a long bus trip with the Cub Scouts to the Franklin Institute in Philly and finding out for the first time that no matter how good a movie is, the book is almost always better.
ODDKINS by Dean R. Koontz--I love this book, particularly the illustrations by Phil Parks. I think what appealed to me so much was the idea that toys do play such an important role in a quiet kid's life (such as mine--"quiet" being a relative term) that it was fun to see them literally come to life (and, remember, this was years before Toy Story came out. This is one of my first Dean Koontz books, too, and I still consider it one of best things he's written. Sadly, it's out of print.
THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE by C.S. Lewis--I would normally just say "duh," but if I learned anything from this little experiment, it's that you can't just take these things for granted. What I still love about this book (and the whole series--The Horse and His Boy is an amazing and risky departure from the world he had established) is that while I clearly understood it better as an adult--I very much so enjoyed it as a child, and don't remember ever feeling like I was being preached to. And I still want to ride a lion.
THE EYES OF THE KILLER ROBOT by John Bellairs--Am I the only one who ever read this book? I feel like it, but I wouldn't care if I was. This combined so many things I loved as a kid: robots, baseball, and just enough scariness to make me not like reading it at night (which of course I did anyway). I honestly never knew if Bellairs wrote anything before or after this book (I was a kid--didn't really "follow" authors; FYI: he did), but I still pull this off my shelf every so often...and still don't like to read it at night.
MOSSFLOWER by Brian Jacques--Mice with swords. Pescatarian recipes I want to eat. I really don't know if I need to go on. Although I read these when I was a little older, I remember how much they caught my attention. Martin the Warrior is truly one of the great fantasy characters (the broken sword around his neck is such an enduring symbol), and the whole Redwall setting--although getting a bit repetitive towards the latter books--is still one I can pick up every now and then and be excited about.
Obviously these are just a few, but there is one more I need to mention, because it seemed like I had raised a mob of pitchfork-wielding twitterers when I casually noticed that a book I never read before kept making peoples' lists:
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle.
So I read it over the weekend--and I wish I had read it twenty years ago. Because then it surely would have made this list.
Let me know what books I missed!
Oh gosh I LOVED Phantom Tollbooth! Still love it. What about TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG by Connie Willis? Does that count as sci-fi?
Also I keep hearing about Suzanne Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES - anyone else read that yet?
The Giver by Lois Lowery was (and still is) an amazing book. It was one of those books that I didn't read until a few years ago and I was amazed that it's technically a YA title. It had more depth and moral conundrums than some adult fiction I read BUT it never felt overwritten or dull. Just pitch perfect the whole way through to the much-debated ending. One of my favs.
Hmmmm. I think the first in-genre books I read were a trilogy by John Christopher. I can't remember the names, but it was two kids, time traveling back to the Ancient Mayan Empire, and I think I remember some Chinese in there somehow as well.
But generally I read more fantasy in middle and high school. Lloyd Alexander, and Pat McKillip started it off, and are still favorites.
Christine--I love any and all things Connie Willis: I just wonder if that's even YA? I think you might have been a lot smarter than me when you were a kid!
And as for the Hunger Games--it's awesome (although I will say it's a bit of a toned-down version of Battle Royale, which I love). And, apparently it's going to be a movie: http://bit.ly/15YZPY. Teen-on-teen murder--that should go over well with parents groups!
My favorite YA SF was a book called Tomorrow's Sphinx by Clare Bell. To date, I haven't met anyone else who's ever read it, much less anything else by Mrs. Bell. Sphinx features a black cheetah on a far-future earth who can mentally communicate with another black cheetah from the past. The other cheetah turns out to be a companion to King Tut, so the story has a wonderful parallel of ancient and future happenings. I still re-read it every couple of years, and continue to adore the story.
You're right--I haven't heard of this! But I'm always open to read new things (especially YA, as I tend to be able to read them a lot quicker). It's always amazing what captures our attention, whether it's when we're young, or even now.
Just to clarify: for those of us who work in the children's book industry, YA is a specific term that means "books for teens," not a general catch-all term. Middle grade books aren't YA.
Yeah, I realized that. But this started as a Twitter post, and characters were of the essence--and then I realized it's kind of cumbersome anyway to not have a term that encompasses this level of reading. Ah well--I do appreciate the clarification.
You know, I read a YA book earlier this year called The Order of Odd-Fish by James Kennedy that has a very Douglas Adams sensibility to it. So if humor, fantasy, and adventure interest you or your favorite YA reader, I'd recommend it. It's one of the few books that had me actually laughing out loud on the subway to and from work.