Recomend me a Book.

[hectorbustnuts]

Don't be put off that you'll likely find it in the "Young Adult" section of the bookstore...it's certainly not "written down" to a younger audience.

That's where most of my books come from.

I'm 31 and I still enjoy a few Young Adult books as well.  Just because the target audience is younger doesn't mean the quality of writing is any less enjoyable. 

Sadly, I find that a lot of the "teen" fiction is written down. 

I'd ploughed through "Lord of the Rings" before I was ten, though, so I can't really judge.

OH!

Another book to check out (again from the "Young Adult" section):

Scott Westerfield's "Leviathan".

Prince Aleksander, would-be heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, is on the run. His own people have turned on him. His title is worthless. All he has is a battletorn war machine and a loyal crew of men.

Deryn Sharp is a commoner, disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She’s a brilliant airman. But her secret is in constant danger of being discovered.

With World War I brewing, Alek and Deryn’s paths cross in the most unexpected way…taking them on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure that will change both their lives forever.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if the First World War had been fought with genetically engineered mutant animals, against steam-powered walking machines? And the answer is, Yes, it would.”
The New York Times

Also well worth checking out.

[thedexter102]

What she said!!

[Alisha Mynx]

Sadly, I find that a lot of the "teen" fiction is written down. 

While I agree that a good chunk of Young Adult works are a lesser quality writing, not all are.  But that's true for about any grouping of writing.  I've picked up novels in series or genres I'd otherwise love and thought "What the heck?  Is the author seven years old?" or similar reactions.  I've also read works by authors I've otherwise enjoyed that are in a different setting or such that I just cannot seem to find the will to finish (or even get past the first few chapters).

Normally I'm not extremely picky so long as I think a setting or premise sounds interesting, but sometimes I just cannot follow through with a book if the writing doesn't, for lack of a better term, feel consistent.

[thedexter102]

For an example of awsome teen fiction see John Green's fantastic Paper Towns.

[Aubreii]

I'm an English teacher and some of the books marked 'young adult' are better than the stuff for us old adults.

Except twilight.



That's shit covered shit.

[greyman24]

Wouldn't that, then, just be shit?

[Aubreii]

Wouldn't that, then, just be shit?

See I knew you'd get it.

[thedexter102]

Well it's fun if nothing else.

[Navarre]

Well it's fun if nothing else.

Sorry. Not so much, really.

But it obviously has a fan base somewhere.

[ikindadislikekevinsmith]

Neuromancer by William Gibson

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Deathbird Stories: A Pantheon of Modern Gods by Harlan Ellison

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

[Gaumer]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Great one! I *heart* this book tons!!

[ikindadislikekevinsmith]

Try Starship Troopers.  It's the nazzi version of Harsh Mistress.

[Gaumer]

Try Starship Troopers.  It's the nazzi version on Harsh Mistress.

hehe

Yup, got that one too

[ikindadislikekevinsmith]

Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.

The title is a riff on some old critique of Darwin.  A guy said, if you walked into the woods and found a watch, you would assume that someone dropped it there, you wouldn’t assume that it just sprang out of nothingness.  So the book shows how “the watch”. life, sprang from unconscious forces.

There’s some cool shit in there.

He talks about how when it was discovered that bats used echolocation to “see”, a lot of people didn’t believe it at first.  But then he goes on to talk about how color isn’t real.  It’s a complete fabrication of our mind.  Color is actually the frequency of the light waves we see.  But rather than present that information to us as a number, which would be useless, our mind attaches a color to it and puts it in our mind’s eye.

So when a bat is flying around clicking and screeching, it’s not listening for the echo, counting one Mississippi, two Mississippi, and doing the math in his head, it’s taking the frequencies of the sound waves and analyzing them, in the same way that we take the frequencies of light waves and analyze them.  And it’s very possible that the sound waves manifest themselves in the bats mind as color.

Check it out, it's pretty cool.

[Gaumer]

TY

I added over at GoodReads.com. Which I really should work on a bit