The other day, while hunting through a bunch of books at the university library, I stumbled upon a book called From Hinton to Hamlet, written by a high school English teacher who, for years, thought that the only books worth teaching were the classics – books published decades or even hundreds of years ago. As you can imagine, many of her students were not interested in the books they worked on in class, getting lost in dense books like The Scarlet Letter or The Grapes of Wrath.

Finally, they struck a bargain, where they would go along with her books if they got to choose their own books for the last segment of the class. Imagine this teacher’s surprise when, not only were the students very interested in the books they got to choose (discipline problems, she said, virtually disappeared as well), but the books they chose reflected the same themes and characters as the books she had chosen for them, just in a way that was more appealing to these teens. From then on, this teacher was dedicated to using recent young adult literature in her classroom as a core part of the curriculum.

All of which is to say that the YA literature that has come out in the past few decades (including the books written in the past year or two) is most certainly not the fluff that some people dismiss it as. Oh sure, there are some terrible, poorly-written, meaningless books out there, but there are also hundreds and hundreds of well-written books jammed with terrific characters and interesting themes and problems.

Am I saying that we should ditch the classics entirely? Of course not; many of them are classics for a reason (that reason is not “the teacher wants to torment all the high school seniors”) and it’d be a shame to miss out on them. But it’s equally foolish to disregard new books solely because they are new or because the teacher hasn’t read them a hundred times.

There are tons of great new books out there, books which will no doubt be classics in another decade or already are. The Book Thief, for example, is – in my mind – an obvious new classic. What new (or newish) adolescent books are classics in your mind?