YA Literature

This semester, I am taking EDT 423, Literature and Other Media for Adolescents. When I was in middle school, and in the first two years of high school, I was constantly reading.

In fact, I read so much that I created an Excel spreadsheet to track the books I was reading. I created several different formulas to track how many pages I read, how many books I gave up on reading because I didn’t like them, and several other criteria.

The Sky is Everywhere by Janddy Nelson is the
book I read for our realistic fiction genre.

I would go to the library and take out as many books as I could – oftentimes, I’d take out 9-12 books and ride home on my bike precariously holding them so I didn’t fall (which, by some miracle, I managed to never fall or drop a book).

So taking this class, I came in expecting to have read several of the books that we’re reading, but I was surprised to find that I have not read most of the books that my classmates and I have chosen for this class.

Most of this could be attributed to the fact that the books we choose to read should have been published within the last five years, and about five years ago is when I stopped reading for fun because reading for school kept me too busy.

But in conjunction with this class, it’s really cool to be in field and see the students reading the same books that my classmates and I are reading for this class.

Each week, we are given a genre and must pick a young adult book within this genre. So far, I have read a teen romance, an information book, a steampunk book, a poetry book, realistic fiction, and for the week after spring break, I am reading a picture book that can be used in a high school classroom.