Timeless Titles

Happy holidays, everyone!

If you're searching for a good book to give to the kids and teens in your life and you're overwhelmed by all of the titles in the new releases section, I suggest getting some timeless titles - especially if it's a series or author that you yourself adored when you were older. That makes the selection and the sharing all the more special. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Classic Staples (all ages)
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Call of the Wild by Jack London
White Fang by Jack London

Fantastic Adventures (for ages 8 and up)
The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Young Wizards by Diane Duane (start with So You Want to be a Wizard)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
The House with a Clock in Its Walls by John Bellairs
The Letter, the Witch, and the Ring by John Bellairs
The Narnia series by C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is my favorite)
The Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix (start with Mister Monday)
Magic Zero quartet by Christopher Golden and Thomas E. Sniegoski (formerly titled OutCast)

Cute Comedies (for ages 8 and up)
* Note that each of these titles, with the exception of Sixth Grade Secrets, is the start of a series!
Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary
Henry Huggins by Beverly Cleary
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume
Everyone Else's Parents Said Yes by Paula Danziger
Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar
Sixth Grade Secrets by Louis Sachar

Mysteries, Murder, and Mischief
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
The Body of Evidence series by Christopher Golden and Rick Hautala (teens and adults; there are ten books in the series, starting with Body Bags)
Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene (many books; #1: The Secret of the Old Clock)
The Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon (many books; #1: The Tower Treasure)

Secrets on the Homefront: World War II (ages 9 and up)
The Diary of Anne Frank
Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

For additional suggestions, pop over to my book blog Bildungsroman where I have booklists galore for all ages in a number of categories. Many for the aforementioned titles are part of my Suggested Sets booklist. Enjoy!

Buy a book for Ballou SR High School on Cyber Monday!

ATTENTION CYBER MONDAY SHOPPERS!!! 

The Book Fair for Ballou Senior High School in Washington DC is back open!

We were delighted to help Ballou librarian Melissa Jackson and her dedicated book club build a wish list on amazon so 175+ books could be bought and sent their way in October. This annual book fair is the primary way in which Ballou HS obtains books the students want and knowing that so many of them are now reading books they have been waiting for (novels! travel guides! history! biography!) has thrilled us to no end.

Seriously, we love helping this incredibly dedicated school librarian out every year!

Here's the drill for the Cyber Monday reopening - the wish list will be open this whole week and then shuts down for 2016 as Ballou gets ready for winter break. This is your last chance to buy a book for this underfunded & very deserving school library! The book club had a few more books to add last week and we got them in there and there are plenty of deals to choose from. Over 340 books are on the list and there is literally something for every price point. (PLENTY of books under $10!)

Buy a book, spread the word, do something good for our future. (And no, I'm not going to get all political right now but seriously - Do Something Good!)

Here is the tinyurl if you want to share it far & wide on social media (and please do!):

http://tinyurl.com/BallouFinal2016

The mailing address is already loaded up on the wish list, so all you need to do is shop & the books will be on their way.

Follow @BallouLibrary on twitter (or facebook) for more pictures as books arrive!

The full link to the Ballou wish list:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/2CU17Q38C3P68/ref=cm_wl_list_o_1?

A Part of the Sky by Robert Newton Peck

With all of the new fiction books that have been published it would be easy to choose one of those books to review. I have found however that some books dealing with times gone past have many life lessons to impart.

Throwing down the gauntlet & getting serious

As you may have noticed, it's been a bit quiet around Guys Lit Wire.

Several of our long time posters have had to leave the site and those of us on the organizing end have been busy with our own projects and work and have not been diligent about filling those slots. We got lazy and while still doing good things (book reviews, the Book Fair for Ballou High School), we have certainly not been doing what I would call important things.

That changes now.

Like most of America, we are kind of freaked out by the current political landscape. No one seems to know what is happening next or what direction the country is taking or what that means for anyone. We are especially sensitive to the concerns of our primary readership: librarians, booksellers, parents and teens who are looking for books that will appeal to reluctant teen readers, especially guys. We think it's time to double down on our initial mission and also, now more than ever, embrace in the broadest possible terms the diversity that makes America such a wonderful place to live.

Diversity is everything in America. 

Let me say that again - diversity is everything in America. It's what matters most. It's what we love about our country and it is what we want to encourage, in ever way possible, in the literary world.

As the granddaughter & great granddaughter of immigrants, and the child of someone who primarily learned to speak English in school, I feel very strongly about this. We have not been doing our job around here on the diversity front and, I promise you, that changes now.

We will still be posting book reviews from a group of varied contributors. We will still be writing about all kinds of books and in some ways, readers will notice hardly any changes at all. We are doubling down however on diversity, in formats (more nonfiction! more poetry! more graphic novels!), in characters, in subject matter and in authors. In addition to reviewing, we are also going to do our best to share news and interviews with diverse authors who we think will appeal to teen readers. We see this as shining a light on the work of those who might be overlooked in the massive coverage of the latest "big thing". And while we certainly enjoy a best seller as much as the next person (and you might very well see a few here that we can't resist noting), we really hope that we can help make a dent in the many issues the literary world is suffering from when it comes to diversity.

More than anything, we will always keep our primary mission of getting the word out on great books but we acknowledge that part of what makes a book great is diversity. 

The thing that is driving us right now is doing what we can to mitigate the fear that so many American children and teens are feeling. We want to do what we can to make sure they know they are not alone. For so many of us, at one time or another, books were important lifelines. We have not forgotten that and want to make sure today's teens can find the books they need to make it through until things get better.

This is an evolving process at Guys Lit Wire - the final rollout of the slightly redesigned site will likely not take place until the end of the year. We are also going to see about partnering up with some other teen focused sites to do some cross-blogging and more.

And we will be back on Cyber Monday to reopen the Book Fair for Ballou High School and hopefully get more books to that Washington DC school library!

I guess my big message with this post was to thank you for hanging in there with us and let you know to watch this space. There are so many things we all need to be doing these days and we hope you will support us as we do what we can in our little corner of the internet.

Fantasy Sports by Sam Bosna

I loved Fantasy Sports, I'd never heard of it before in my life and decided to buy it for the library based solely on the cover.

I'm glad I did. It's like Big Trouble in Little China if Kurt Russell had to play a game of basketball to defeat Lo Pan.

Wiz and Mug are an unlikely pair. Wiz is a small, snarky, intelligent wizard with a lot to prove. She's working for Mug, a Zangief-esque brute who thinks with his fists before his head. 

This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp is told in short chapters, sharing the story of a school shooting in “real-time,” told from the perspective of four students with various connections to the shooter, filling in some blanks and gaps as we proceed breathlessly to the inevitable conclusion.

I finished This Is Where It Ends the day before our faculty spent a morning undergoing active shooter response training, training that served as a morbid fact check for Nijkamp’s novel.

We were told that nearly all school shootings involve a single shooter (Columbine being a notable exception).

We were told that in nearly all school shootings the shooter is a young male.

We were told that nearly all school shootings end only when the shooter is killed or kills himself.

We were shown ways to distract, attack, disable, and disarm a shooter.

We were told that locking classroom doors and hiding, as we have been trained to do in the past, is often not the best way to deal with an active shooter scenario.

We were not told how we would react if this scenario became a reality. We were not told this because none of us know. None of us know whether the fear will paralyze us, whether self-preservation will make cowards of us, whether self-preservation is even cowardice, or whether some potent cocktail of adrenaline and morality will lead us to heroic actions. We were not told whether these heroic actions will be where it ends for us or for the shooter or both.

Nijkamp tells us where it ends for Tyler, the lone gunman. She tells us where it ends for his sister. She tells us where it ends for his sister’s girlfriend. She tells us where it ends for teachers and students alike. She tells us in staccato bursts, like gunfire, ricocheting between narrators, disorienting us at times. She shows us sacrifice and heroism and fear and terror and panic and cruelty.

Some readers may want more about where it began, more about how Tyler broke bad, more about character relationships. But Nijkamp’s novel is not primarily about those things (if you want those things, I recommend We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver). This is a novel about how much your life can change in an hour. This a novel about the short sharp shock of where it ends.