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.
