yalsa 2017 hub reading challenge

YALSA’s 2017 Hub Reading Challenge

Get ready, lovers of Young Adult books!  The 2017 Hub Reading Challenge is here!  What is the Hub Challenge, you ask?

The Hub is the blog for YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association), a division of the American Library Association.  Every winter they sponsor a reading challenge featuring an amazing variety of award-winning young adult books published in the previous year.

To get details and the official list of books, go to the 2017 announcement.

The challenge is to read at least 25 of the 90+ books on the list by June 22nd.  Those completing the challenge will be invited to post a response on The Hub to one of the books they read. They will also be entered into a drawing to win a tote filled with YA books.

This will be my 4th year participating in the challenge. I first heard about the challenge in 2014 when the challenge was already well underway.  To be able to complete it on time, I read a lot of the graphic novels, a format that was new to me, and many of the shorter books.  By 2015 I was ready and waiting for the challenge to start.  This gave me time to be choosy about the books I read and also gave me plenty of time to put library holds on the popular books and to Interlibrary Loan books I couldn’t find locally.

Last year I decided to read books from all the award lists and I made sure to include all the possible formats: novels, graphic novels, and audio books.  I also wanted to read all the nonfiction books on the list (since I normally read mostly fiction books) and all the Alex Award books.

To help me do that again this year, I organized the book list by award. Several of the titles won multiple awards and are therefore listed more than once. This will also help me identify the Odyssey Award winners and the Top Ten Audiobook winners, which I really want to listen to.  Hopefully, this list will be helpful to others as well.  I did find a few discrepancies between the books listed on the Hub list and on the Award sites so I may need to make a few minor adjustments to my list.  Here is my list organized by the award category.  

As I complete books I’ll blog about them.  I’d love to hear which books you’re reading and what you think about them!  Good luck to all those who accept the challenge and Happy Reading!

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