As an organization that provides academic afterschool programs to students, we are naturally concerned with the development of their literacy skills and abilities and encouraging their life long interest in reading. These are a few reasons why each year we join the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) in recognizing and celebrating Teen Read Week™, a national adolescent literacy initiative created to encourage teens to be regular readers and library users.
An annual celebration, this year’s theme, Get Away, encourages libraries to help teens escape from the day to day grind of school, homework, family responsibilities, part time jobs and other activities by picking up something to read.
In Reach found the Teens' Top Ten "teen choice" list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year, to be an amazing resource. Readers ages twelve to eighteen vote online and the winners for that year are announced the week after Teen Read Week. Below is the Top Ten for 2014. Encourage a teen to read at least one of these today. It's a great list to use as encouragement for reading throughout the year, i.e. read-a-thon, book club and so much more. We can barely wait to see what teens from across the country select for 2015.
2014 Teens’ Top Ten
1. Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (Macmillan/St. Martin's Griffin)
2. Splintered by A.G. Howard (ABRAMS/Amulet Books)
3. The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson (Tor Teen)
4. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey (Penguin/Putnam Juvenile)
5. Monument 14: Sky on Fire by Emmy Laybourne (Macmillan/Feiwel & Friends)
6. Earth Girl by Janet Edwards (Prometheus Books /Pyr)
7. The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
8. Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson (Random House/Delacorte Press)
9. Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo (Macmillan/Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
10. The Eye of Minds by James Dashner (Random House/Delacorte Press)
