When I started getting back into reading I mostly jumped into Young Adult with my eyes closed. I just kind of went with what was popular at the time. Not always the best choice for me. I’ve gotten more picky with what kind of YA I want to read. These days I still read Young Adult, but I am more drawn to SFF Adult.
Logging onto Goodreads this Monday morning resulted in seeing that they have a young adult week going this week and I figured why not have another look like I did with the SFF week.
The 100 Most Popular YA Novels on Goodreads
It’s about 50-50 for the YA novels I’ve read of this top 100. Interestingly the top 10 is 60-40.
The Top 10 consists of: HP | The Hunger Games | The Fault in Our Stars | Divergent | The Book Thief | The Giver | City of Bones | The Perks of a Wallflower | Looking for Alaska | A Wrinkle in Time
There are not a whole lot of surprises in this list except maybe the two Sarah Dessen novels. Well at least for me anyway. Mostly you can see that I’ve read most of the SFF portion of this top 100 and not so much the contemporary side of things which is still fairly accurate for my brand, lol.
The 40 Most Recent Young Adult Novels
I’ve read less here which is not so surprising considering that I have been reading less YA. Actually it is still kind of high.
The Top 10 consists of: The Hate U Give | Turtles All the Way Down | One of Us is Lying | The Cruel Prince | Always and Forever Lara Jean | Caraval | Children of Blood and Bone | King’s Cage | Kingdom of Ash | Lord of Shadows
Surprisingly I’ve read more contemporary on this list like Lara Jean, The Upside of Unrequited and The Poet X. I see a lot of sequels on this list. That is always interesting to see.
48 Highly Anticipated YA Novels for the Rest of 2020
Lastly I’d like to have a look at the list they created for these anticipated YA novels. One thing that stands out to me right away is that it is way more diverse than the other two lists. I see books like: Star Daughter, Cemetery Boys, Legendborn, Raybearer, The Silvered Serpents, Punching the Air, Miss Meteor and Occulta.
Again i just goes to show how much work we still have to do on the diverse end. The fact that we see so many diverse books in a hand picked list but not in a list that shows what is being read widely on goodreads just shows that we still have a lot of readers still to reach.
A Dance With Books 
I will now go to Goodreads and compare as you picked my interest!
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How did it work out for you?
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I haven’t looked at the YA lists to see how many I’ve read, though I did check out the SFF list and had read a fair number of those books. I’m curious now, though, since I’ve been reading a lot more YA again lately than I had been for a while. Of course, “more” is relative… the bulk of my reading is still adult fiction instead of YA. Now that you mention it, though, I think that my YA reading has been more racially diverse than my adult books have been. Hmm. That’s something to work on.
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In YA there is more racially diverse books in the spotlights than in adult I feel sometimes. It is easier to find those books now than it was a few years ago. Though we still need to work on that more.
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I agree, it does seem easier to find racially diverse books in YA than adult fiction. And yes, we’ve made huge improvements in being able to find them. Here’s hoping it keeps getting better!
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I think I started reading young adult books at the end of 2011 (after reading The Hunger Games). Since then, I became a fan. There’s still a lot of work to do regarding YA book and diversity. I have been trying to read more Black and POC authors and thanks to Scribd, I have been able to do that.
Happy readings!
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Its great you have been working on that. I’ve been working on that too.
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Remember about three/four years ago when the Diverse YA push on Twitter was a huge thing and everyone was asking for recommendations? I kept a list of all the bloggers I gave recs to to see if they read any of the diverse books, not only I had rec’d, but others had suggested, and the follow up was very disappointing. Most basically read one book and then went back to their YA with White girls in fancy dresses holding swords, and some didn’t read any at all. The worst was one blogger did a blog post about diverse YA and a year later had not read one diverse book. The other thing I noticed was it was bloggers over 25 who seemed to be more serious about reading diversely. 😛
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Oh yeah a lot of the follow up just isn’t there. Many of the time they just end up spending their moneys on their white faves. It is still mostly the same people that are trying.
I hope at least that as some of them get older they will follow through more.
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