oh there’s plenty of boring and self-important YA stuff. but thankfully, there’s plenty of great stuff too.
I also read “Skellig” and highly recommend it.
I don’t think “Flowers for Algernon” has sex scenes? but I’m not gonna go pick it up to check, cause I don’t wanna cry.
that reminds me - any love for “Mrs. Fisby and the Rats of NIMH” - just saw it on the shelf. another goodie.
I love childrens’ and YA books. I remember when I was a kid, my grandma would take me to the library and I’d check out an armload of books. Everything on the shelves looked so wonderful. Then I’d get home and discover that almost all of it was wonderful. It was a very happy time. I don’t see why I shouldn’t read all these great books just because they weren’t written back then!
The Andre Norton & Robert Heinlein juveniles.
Ha, I also read 1984 because it was on the shelf in my social studies classroom. I didn’t understand a word of it. 
I just finished Wildwood, which is rather fun, and got the 4th book in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s current series, which is called Torn. Time-traveling teenagers! I also have the latest Theodosia book on my library-books shelf. (To give you an idea of the ratio, I have 20 books on that shelf at the moment.)
Plain Kate is one of the best children’s/YA books of the year IMO. (You could give it to a 5th grader who doesn’t mind scary, but it’s officially YA.)
I read the Bible the other day. Boom! jk, uh well sometimes I read stuff I liked as a kid for nostalgia’s sake but it usually ruins the nostalgia unfortunately. The Xanth series is kind of pervy, but certainly easy too read, but I don’t know maybe it doesn’t qualify.
Like others, I’ll read anything with words, from Dr. Seuss to Carl Sagan.
I love the Soup books, the Fear Street books, and the Redwall series. I recently picked up a copy of the Giver, and was pleasantly surprised to learn that it had 2 sequels, which I still need to read.
As for the topic on what is and isn’t appropriate, I can’t really say. I was reading Stephen King when I was in 5th grade and the librarians at both the elementary school and local library didn’t have a problem letting me check his books out.
I would have said “no” to this question, but I think I’m covering that territory while working my way through Terry Pratchett. I had noted that some titles in the great reading guide pdf linked here in another thread were Young Adult, but I liked the characters and settings, and so… what the heck!
Xanth never got shelved in the YA section at my library. The first couple of books were maybe ok, but they grew quickly worse and probably once Dolph was a main character and definitely by The Color of Her Panties middle schoolers probably shouldn’t be reading them. (Even in the first book there’s the character Chameleon whose appearance and intelligence vary with the moon. Over the course of a month she vacillates from extremely beautiful but dumber than a rock and horribly ugly but with a razor-sharp intelligence. It’s not a particularly complimentary view on women and while it may not leap off the page for 7th graders, but I’d still feel ooky for letting them read it.)
I used to read a lot of YA stuff. Less now, but I read less fiction in general. If I ever have kids my bookshelves will certainly have a large stock of Diana Wynne Jones, Robin McKinley, Louis Sachar, and other writers.
Ya well in 6th grade my teacher grabbed one of the books out my hand since I liked to read them (Xanth books) so much and wasn’t paying attention in class, she started reading it to the class, “Whats so interesting about these books?” It was a part where the smimurgin or whatever is showing them future tomes of the land of Xanth (future book titles) one of them being “The Color of Her Panties” when she got to that line she read it without realizing then tried to cover it up, “What was that? Her ping pong? Take your book…” She never bothered me about it again lol.
but ya I haven’t read them much in quite some time, they were better when I was in elementary school and middle school.
Heh, I remember reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in 5th grade. My teacher looked at the cover and told me to leave books like that at home from then on. Since the cover was of a 20some year old women wrapped in a towel, I can only assume she thought it was a romance novel rather than a woman’s journey through schizophrenia.
Back in 7th or 8th grade, the reading teacher kept a classroom library, and she had a small selection of fantasy and science fiction. She was either way more relaxed about preteens reading sex scenes than most adults of the time, or she just bought up books at garage sales, but whatever…she had a couple of Gor books in the library. The later ones, with some pretty heavy sex slavery themes in them.
Just want to say I hated the sequels to the Giver. Author should have left her classics alone.
I enjoyed maybe the first five Xanth novels when I was in Jr. High. But when the puns got so lame and obvious and stupid, and he started crediting them in the afterwards–“thanks to So-and-So Reader for sending in the idea of the [insert stupid pun here]” I gave up. A pun has to be REALLY clever and actually FIT INTO THE CONVERSATION for me to not hate it. As a general rule, I loathe puns. So those books were…not for me.
I love the (almost dying) art-form of incidental book illustration (as opposed to completely illustrated childrens books) and that generally means kid’s books - The Steward/Riddell Edge Chronicles, Muddle Earth & Barnaby Grimes; DiTerlizzi’s Spiderwick; Moers’ Zamonia books and Barker’s Abarat
I didn’t want this gem to go unremarked. Bravo!