YouthFund
Fifteen books worth finishing.
Some were voted for by readers your age, some were named by adults asked which book changed them at sixteen, and a few are ours. Nobody is quizzing you on any of them. Pick it yourself, and remember that your library card is free.
If reading feels hard right now
The Crossover
Kwame Alexander
Twin brothers, a basketball season, and a family. Written in verse, so it moves fast, and it earns its ending.
Legendary Frybread Drive-In
Edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith
Intertribal stories set around one drive-in, by many different writers. Short stories, so you can read one and stop, then find you did not want to.
Sunrise on the Reaping
Suzanne Collins
The newest Hunger Games. If everyone around you is reading it, that is a perfectly good reason to read it.
If you want to build something
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
A fourteen-year-old in Malawi is pulled out of school when his family cannot pay the fees, teaches himself physics from library books, and builds a windmill out of scrap. Young Readers Edition available.
Shoe Dog
Phil Knight
The first twenty years of Nike, when it was one man selling shoes out of his car and nearly running out of money every single year.
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough
Two bicycle mechanics with no funding, no degrees and no permission solve a problem better-resourced people had failed at for years.
If you want to understand how the world works
Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterly
The women mathematicians whose calculations put Americans into space, and who did that work without anyone outside the building knowing their names. Young Readers' Edition available.
Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults
Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith
A botanist who is also a member of the Potawatomi Nation puts two ways of knowing plants side by side, the laboratory and the inherited kind, and treats both as knowledge.
A Search for Common Ground
Frederick M. Hess and Pedro A. Noguera
Two people who disagree about nearly everything in American education, writing to each other anyway. Read it for how they argue, not for what they conclude.
If you are still working out who you want to be
The Outsiders
S. E. Hinton
Written by a seventeen-year-old about being seventeen, and about the difference between the group you were put in and the person you are.
Quiet Power
Susan Cain
For anyone who has been told to speak up more. Cain makes the case that the quieter half of the room is not a problem to be fixed.
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ten letters to a nineteen-year-old who wrote asking whether his poems were any good. Rilke answers a much better question instead.
Poems and short things worth keeping
Devotions
Mary Oliver
Fifty years of poems about paying attention to ordinary things. A collection you keep by the bed rather than finish.
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
One of the most translated books ever written, which makes it a good one to read in your first language and then again in the one you are learning.
Three Hundred Tang Poems
Various, twelve centuries ago
Poems about homesickness, friendship and the moon, written in eight lines or fewer. Find a bilingual edition and read both sides.
Finished one?
Tell us which one and what you thought of it. We would rather hear that you argued with a book than that you agreed with it.