Audiobooks are excellent tools to help students build literacy skills as well as improve listening, writing, and vocabulary competencies. In many shared or independent reading situations, audiobooks offer support to reluctant and struggling readers, special-needs students, and English-language learners. They are also embraced by voracious readers.…

This article offers a savvy guide to the best graphic nonfiction books for teens. Many of these titles work well with teens, offering them quick access to facts and an enjoyable encounter with books and information literacy. In putting together this list of essential titles for high schoolers, the author searched for graphic nonfiction that is…

Street lit is controversial stuff. Even though street lit is a huge hit with today's teens, one will not find the semiautobiographical novels of Vickie Stringer and Nikki Turner, the grandes dames of urban fiction, on many (if any) high school reading lists or, for that matter, on some public libraries' shelves. That's because street lit (aka…

This article is a discussion of authors and controversial novels that should be on the top of library media specialists' reading list if they work with high-school-age teens. "Controversial" is not a dirty word, it is an enticement! The goal of library media specialists is to get teens who may be burned out with reading due to incentive programs…

For busy library media specialists, booktalks are an easy way to tempt reluctant readers and guide frequent readers in finding what they want to read. This collection of over 150 booktalks based on the best-of-the-best award-winning books for grades 9-12, with many taken from the American Library Association and International Reading Association's…

Getting teens to read, much less enjoy classic literary fiction is an on-going challenge for educators and librarians. However, Holly Koelling--author, YA librarian, and "booktalker extraordinaire"--offers a variety of techniques for rising to that challenge and successfully selecting, presenting, and connecting teens with great literature in the…

The goal of the Texas Reading Club is to encourage the children of Texas to become library users and lifelong readers. This manual was created for the 2002 Texas Reading Club, a program of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. The theme, "Read Across Texas!" invites children to explore the history, geography, and culture of…

A summer reading program can be designed to attract not just those teenagers who love to read, but also nonreaders who have yet to experience the joy of reading. This book gathers from library literature and previously unpublished accounts of recent programs and provides information about different kinds of summer reading programs designed…

This publication describes 40 fiction and nonfiction titles for grades 5 through 12 that will get the attention of even the most reluctant readers. Books range from humor and romance to adventure, mystery, and the supernatural. The titles were chosen based on the following criteria: recent publication date; relatively short length; appealing…