Teenreads.com’s “Ultimate Teen Reading List” Celebrates Five Years and Announces New Titles

Teenreads.com Expands Ultimate Teen Reading List for Five-Year Anniversary

NEW YORK — March 24, 2011 — Teenreads.com, a website in TheBookReportNetwork.com, has updated its Ultimate Teen Reading List. The list includes nearly 400 titles, ranging from fiction to nonfiction that are recommended pleasure reading for teens aged 12-17. Twenty-one graphic novel and manga titles appear on the list this year, the first time this format has been spotlighted this heavily.

“We started the Ultimate Teen Reading List in 2006, as we noticed that many required reading lists were dated and we felt that they were not inspiring pleasure reading,” says Carol Fitzgerald, Founder of Teenreads.com and President of TheBookReportNetwork.com. “Our goal in creating this list was to get teen readers excited about reading by selecting books that would appeal to them. We hope that schools and libraries will adopt titles from our list to supplement their suggested or required reading lists.”

The Ultimate Teen Reading List features classics like George Orwell’s 1984 and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but has been updated with newer titles such as Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, and The Hunger Games Trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

Graphic novel and manga titles that have been added to the list include Fables by Bill Willingham, Watchmen by Alan Moore, and Stitches by David Small. Two books — The Alchemist and Twilight — are on the list in both prose and graphic novel formats. “On another website in TheBookReportNetwork.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com, we have seen graphic novels and manga being adopted into the school curriculum. Given that many educators are not familiar with the format, beyond The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman, which also appears on the list, we wanted to include these to ensure that there was a cultivated list of selections,” Fitzgerald said.

Teenreads.com compiled the list by incorporating suggestions from its more than 382,000 unique monthly readers as well as research by their staffers into what they felt were “must-reads” for teens. Books on the list include young adult titles like Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, Stolen by Lucy Christopher and The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhart, as well as adult titles that teens would enjoy such as Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford and Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard by Liz Murray.

For more information or to view all of the titles on the Teenreads.com Ultimate Teen Reading List please visit: http://teenreads.com/features/ultimate-reading-list.asp

About TheBookReportNetwork.com: TheBookReportNetwork.com (TBRN) is a group of eight websites about books and authors that have become gathering places for a devoted community of more than 1.6 million booklovers since 1996. TBRN’s other sites include flagship site, Bookreporter.com, ReadingGroupGuides.com, GraphicNovelReporter.com, Teenreads.com, Kidsreads.com, FaithfulReader.com, AuthorsOnTheWeb.com and AuthorYellowPages.com, a searchable directory of author websites.

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Maureen Linehan
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