(no subject)

[the_rck]

Cordelia has decided that, when trying to find books to read at the library, she will just take the first two or three books that she hasn't already read. I'm not sure she's going to be happy with this method of selecting books, but it will mean that she's trying new things.

I don't know if she'll take recommendations, but she's now reading YA. She liked The Heroes of Olympus, The Hunger Games books, the Divergent books, Cinder by Marissa Meyer, and Ruby Red by Kirsten Gier. She's not interested in vampires. I'm not sure how she feels about zombies and angels/demons. She does judge books more on their covers than on their blurbs.

I got her started on GoodReads, but she says the books the site suggests 'look boring.' From talking to her, she's not actually looking at the blurbs, just at the cover images.

Comments

[antisoppist]

My 13 year old has enjoyed the Heroes of Olympus, the Hunger Games and Divergent and is now into the Skulduggery Pleasant books by Derek Landy, if that helps as a rec. Wikipedia says the first one has a different US title.

She tends to want me to magically find her perfect books but fortunately has discovered a couple of keen readers in this year's English class and they are all now borrowing from each other, which is brilliant.

[retsuko]

I'm really curious now what her criteria for an "interesting" cover are. I can think of some books that have wonderful covers but turn out to be awful once you get into them, and some books with terrible covers that ended up being the best books in the whole world. :)

[the_rck]

I'm not sure. I haven't asked her to show me examples.

Most of the books she's read recently, though, have had young women on the cover.

[kyrielle]

I almost wonder whether she might do better with an Amazon account (with no tied payment info). I found GoodReads recommendations mostly just ticked me off, while Amazon did pretty well until I started buying so many things for the boys. (Now it just wants me to read board books. Sigh.)

[the_rck]

It's possible. Though I've had much better luck with GoodReads than with Amazon. Amazon only seems to want to suggest recent books to me and generally things in which I have utterly no interest. It seems to have gotten the idea that I like urban fantasy, a genre I almost entirely loathe. GoodReads never suggests urban fantasy, vampires or zombies to me.

You can tell Amazon not to use certain books for recommendations. That's what I do when I buy something for Scott or Cordelia.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

Lots of people choose books by their covers. That's why so many stores and libraries set up tables showing a couple of dozen recommended books with their covers prominently displayed. Some of the libraries around here have YA librarians (if yours doesn't, the kids' librarian would probably be helpful) that love to advise young people who say, "I liked this and didn't like that. What should I try next?" Then she can discard the ones with covers she doesn't like.

I think she'd really like the Cronus Chronicles, by Anne Ursu. They're exciting in some of the same ways as The Heroes of Olympus, but the heroes are more like normal kids. If she liked the aspects of dystopias based on creepy super-organized conformity, in Hunger Games and Divergent, she might like Uglies and its sequels by Scott Westerfeld. (But if she's sensitive about body image, they might be too uncomfortable. Some 11 year olds are children, and some are young women.) A different Westerfeld series starts with Leviathan, and I'm more confident of her liking that if she likes Cinder. It has an amazing steampunk war between giant robots and genetically engineered giant flying things. With a plucky girl-disguised-as-boy because she wants to fly.

If she likes graphic novels, Girl Genius is probably worth a try. Snark, cyborgs, adventure, and characters escaping from conformity to seek out their glorious destinies. She can look at a few pages online to see if she likes it, but it's much easier to read the bound volumes. Some libraries shelve them in YA, but there's no consistency there.

[the_rck]

Unfortunately, the library no longer has books 1 and 2 of the Cronus Chronicles. They used to, but they don't any more. I hesitate to buy anything for Cordelia because she pretty much never reads purchased books unless they're by Rick Riordan. I suppose we could get them through ILL, but I'd only want to do that if Cordelia was enthusiastic about the idea.

I will suggest Uglies to her.

She doesn't generally read graphic novels. We do own several volumes of Girl Genius, though. I'm not sure where they are, but I know we've bought the first six or seven of them.

[evalerie.livejournal.com]

For whatever it's worth: When I was a kid, I decided to just go through and read the entire kids' fiction section of the library, starting at A and working my way all the way through. I know I got to at least M, because I ran across Anne McCaffrey that way. But then I think I followed the McCaffrey series upstairs to the Young Adult department and switched to reading Young Adult books after that. But anyway, my point is that I found a lot of good books that way that I never would have chosen on my own. So maybe Cordelia will do that too. :)

[the_rck]

We'll see how this goes. I don't mind her taking this approach. It's much better than wandering around the shelves, making unhappy faces and refusing to so much as touch a book. I'm just not sure how much she'll like what she tries; she's kind of conservative about what she reads.