If you're reading this blog, chances are you're a reader. (Or you're related to me and read this blog out of obligation). And if you're a reader now, chances are, you were a reader when you were younger. I know I was. (My mom has a lot of pictures of me from when I was about 8-14 years old where I have my nose stuck in a book.) I wish I had kept a list of all of the books I read back then, or even kept all of the books themselves. But I do remember some of them – the Judy Blume books, of course, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe series, and the Madeleine L'Engle books, and so many others that I read and re-read. Collectively, they made a big impression on me back when I was impressionable, and they got me to love reading. Young Adult, or YA, seems to be a much bigger genre now than it was when I was a young adult, but there were still a lot of great books around back then.
Lizzie Skurnick, who writes a column about YA books for the sharply funny blog Jezebel, has written a book called Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading. Amazon calls it a "spastically composed, frequently hilarious omnibus of meditations on
favorite YA novels [which] dwells mostly among the old-school titles from the late '60s
to the early '80s much beloved by now grown-up ladies."
If you want to hear more about Shelf Discovery, Lizzie will be interviewed on Authors on Air on Blog Talk Radio on Wednesday, September 23 at 3 PM EST. If you've never tuned into Blog Talk Radio, it's a channel of talk
shows that you can listen to online or by phone. If you do want to
listen in to the show about Lizzie and Shelf Discovery, you should register for Blog Talk Radio in advance, so that you can call in or write in with a question. Registration is free. Here is more information about Wednesday's show.
I can't wait to read Shelf Discovery and revisit some of my favorite YA books, and I am looking forward to the show.