Melvin Burgess's top 10 books written for teenagers

From supernatural big-hitters Pullman and Meyer to thrillers from Kevin Brooks and unforgettable imagery from David Almond, the author of "Junk" lists his favourite teen fiction. The author Melvin Burgess published his first book, The Cry of the Wolf, in 1990, but is best known for Junk, his 1996 novel dealing with the tricky and controversial subject of heroin addiction in teenagers. His latest novel, Nicholas Dane, a punchy modern-day adaptation of Oliver Twist, is out now.

"Fiction for teenagers is a comparatively new affair. When I was in my teens no one wrote any at all. You had to go straight from children's books to adult books without a pause. Even when I started writing in the 1990s, what was called teen fiction was really only for the first two or three years at high school at the most, with one or two honourable exceptions.

"Today, teenage fiction still covers a multitude of sins. It can range from books really written for children, which publishers call 'teen' for sales reasons, through books aimed at high-school students up to the age of 14 or so, to books for people nearing the end of their school careers. So here's a list of the top 10 writers who write (or wrote) especially for people of at least 14. It contains the most influential, the most popular, and in some cases simply the best."

1. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Robert Cormier

Cormier was writing quality fiction for teenagers way back in the 1970s, which makes him officially the granddaddy of us all. He conquered that most difficult of tricks: writing brilliant thrillers with beautiful prose and startling but believable characters. If he was writing for adults, he'd have won every prize going.

2. Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers

Chambers's teen tales were the first that aimed to be really serious literature. His books aren't for everyone – his dialogue, in particular, clanks alarmingly – but these are intellectually and emotionally challenging books that examine the deeper things that affect teenage lives. It's not about the girl next door, or how well you're going to do in the exams. It's about who are you, why you're here – and what are you going to do about it anyway?

3. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman

Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is famous for its theological mirroring of Paradise Lost, but Pullman's reputation stands on his storytelling. Setting up the heavenly hordes as an enemy of life got him into trouble, but the imaginative range and wealth of characters, especially in this first book, is wonderful.

4. Junk by Melvin Burgess

My novel Junk was the first truly teenage book to attract a wide readership and deal with serious social issues upfront and honestly. There was a tremendous hue and cry when it first came out. At the time, no one really knew about teenage fiction, and the press were appalled and fascinated that a book talking knowledgeably about drugs and addiction should be awarded a children's book prize. Is it any good? I can't say, since I wrote it myself.

5. Skellig by David Almond

Almond's books contain stories of great beauty and hope – magical realism for young people, written in graceful, accessible prose. There are images in them you will never forget, and Skellig is one of his finest.

6. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

Blackman passes the test on all counts: first black woman to sell more than a million books; an OBE; and a huge following. Plus, she manages about the best plotting of anyone writing for young people today. The trilogy of Noughts and Crosses books are thrillers, but with a sharp eye for social, personal and racial politics. No one does it better.

7. Martyn Pig by Kevin Brooks

Brooks is another thriller writer, the natural successor to Cormier. His books don't touch on society in the way Cormier's do, but they are beautifully written and stylish. His young male protagonists are at once touchingly innocent and knowing, quirky and very sexy.

8. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

This book, published for teenagers, became a bestseller with all ages. Like many great teen books, it is the voice of the narrator that makes it work so well. Christopher is autistic, and when he feels things aren't as they seem, he has to find out about them in his own way. Partly because we know more than him, partly because he is so brave and determined, the story makes a fascinating, funny and memorable read.

9. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Rosoff's debut spawned a host of copycat efforts, but it remains ahead of the game. Daisy's voice is the key: you'll rarely meet a character with so many facets, so lucidly written. Some find Rosoff's mucking around with punctuation an irritant, but the book will be read for years to come. 

10. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Meyer is a game-changer. For years, publishers have been looking for mass-market teen fiction, and she's the first to have broken through. There's nothing new here: Meyer is no stylist; her characters are predictable; this is really just good old-fashioned romance with a supernatural twist. But if your brain is mashed from too much studying, curl up with a Twilight and she'll do the rest.

Meg Rosoff's top 10 adult books for teenagers

Meg Rosoff is the author of How I Live Now, the tale of a 15-year-old American girl sent to live with her cousins in a future England just as a third world war is breaking out. It won the Guardian award and was shortlisted for the Orange prize and the Whitbread. Her latest novel. Just In Case, about a teenage boy who suddenly realises the fragility of life.

1. All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

It's the last gasp of the American Western, pre-second world war, and a 16-year-old year old orphan sets off on horseback to Mexico to find work. This book wasn't published until 1992, but if it had been around when I was a teenager, I'd have lost my mind with happiness. Lots of horses, violence, a disappearing way of life, and wonderful, brutal, poetic use of language.

2. Maus by Art Spiegelman

If you've never read a graphic novel, this is the place to start. Spiegelman's attempts to talk with his irrascible elderly father about his experiences in Auschwitz form the basis of this vivid, chilling, personal account of life in a second world war concentration camp. The depiction of Germans as cats and Jews as mice somehow does the opposite of trivializing the subject.

3. Casino Royale and Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

These two original James Bond books, written in 1953 and 1954, leave the movies and all the pretender follow-up books in the dust. Gritty, sexy, beautifully written and filled with amazing adventures, they date from the heady days of the international cold war, when spies were hard and gadgets were thrilling. The good news is that if you love them as much as I did, there are about a dozen more to follow that are equally good.

4. Kon Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

I've read this book about a hundred times, though I have to admit I usually skip the beginning and the end, moving straight in to the heart of this Norwegian explorer's journey across more than 4,000 miles of the Pacific ocean on a homemade raft. Using no modern technology, Heyerdahl wanted to replicate a journey he was convinced had been made by South American Indians to Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. The descriptions of four months on board the balsa wood raft is breathtaking. In anxious times of my life, this book has gently steered me towards calmer waters.

5. The Sword in the Stone by TH White

This story of the coming of age of the Wart (the future King Arthur) describes Merlyn's unorthodox tutelage (he turns the Wart into a variety of animals so he can understand the world through the eyes of other creatures), stressing the importance of ruling wisely and avoiding war. There's a line in it I've never forgotten, spoken by Merlyn. "The best thing for feeling sad is to learn something." Full of quiet wisdom.

6. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

More passions - this time political idealism and love during wartime. Bomb expert Robert Jordan runs away to Spain to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. His high ideals receive a bashing and he falls deeply in love with a beautiful young partisan. Romance, idealism, tragedy - all rendered in Hemingway's wonderfully concise prose.

7. Perfume by Patrick Suskind

18th century Paris, and one of the first books that put me off writing - I just knew I could never write a book this good. The book's second paragraph alone makes it worth reading: "In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots..."

8. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Surely one of the greatest anti-war books ever written. And definitely the funniest.

9. Longitude by Dava Sobel

I love books that race along with a great story and impart a big chunk of history while you're not noticing. This book makes the 18th century feel as immediate as last month, and presents science as the creative problem-solving field it really is (not that dull stuff they make you memorise in school).

10. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This book saved my life the summer I was 15, sent to live with a French family whose kids were far more gorgeous and sophisticated than I was. My French wasn't brilliant and though they were terribly nice, I had the awful feeling that they'd have preferred me not to be there, interfering with their romances and tagging along like the gauche younger sister. So what I really needed was a story of murder and guilt, poverty, prostitution, longing and intrigue to lose myself in. A detective story and a psychological thriller, passionate and absorbing.

Best-Selling Young Adult Books, 2009

Rank	Title	Format	Author
1.	New Moon	Trade Paperback	Stephenie Meyer
2.	Breaking Dawn	Hardcover	Stephenie Meyer
3.	Eclipse	Hardcover	Stephenie Meyer
4.	Twilight	Trade Paperback	Stephenie Meyer
5.	The Last Straw	Hardcover	Jeff Kinney
6.	Dog Days	Hardcover	Jeff Kinney
7.	Diary of a Wimpy Kid	Hardcover	Jeff Kinney
8.	The Last Olympian	Hardcover	Rick Riordan
9.	Eclipse	Trade Paperback	Stephenie Meyer
10.	Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself	Hardcover	Jeff Kinney

The Times - 10 Best Book Websites

1 DailyLit.com

Fancy a daily dose of literature? Just sign up, select a book (the emphasis is on out-of-copyright classics, and most are free), then set aside a few minutes a day to read the pages the site e-mails to you at whatever time you choose. The text is readable on a computer and most mobile devices.

2 Shelfari.com

Described as a "social network for people who love books", this site consists of a lot of people cataloguing the books they have on their shelves then indulging in some lively literary banter. For a similar proposition, check out LibraryThing.com .

3 RareBookRoom.org

You'll probably never get your hands on a first-edition Shakespeare, but this is the next-best thing: 400 priceless literary treasures scanned in ultra high-resolution, now yours to peruse online.

4 FreeBookSpot.com

A goldmine of downloadable textbooks, saved as PDFs, meaning that unlike most electronic book formats, the diagrams and illustrations are preserved. Most take less than 60 seconds to download over broadband.

5 Authonomy.com

Launched last year by HarperCollins, the publisher, this site allows aspiring authors to upload their novels and have them read — and judged — by fellow members. It has already identified some up-and-coming talent, and the best offerings are now being printed.

6 Books.google.com

Also known as Google Book Search, this is a gateway to all manner of free book and magazine content, much of it downloadable. The search function is particularly strong, and is able to pull up specific text buried in any of the umpteen-million pages the company has scanned to date.

7 Blurb.com

Got a book in you? Use Blurb's free software to lay it out, then upload it, and the site will make it into a real paperback, with prices starting at around a fiver.

8 BookCrossing.com

BookCrossing is the practice of leaving a book you've read for someone else to pick up by following your online directions. Nearly 800,000 people in 130 countries are involved.

9 LibriVox.org

This is the home of free, downloadable audiobooks — mainly classics and read by volunteers. It may be the only way you get to hear Dickens read in a Liverpool accent.

10 Goodreads.com

Described as "the world's largest reading room", the site is home to an active and well-informed community of bookworms.

Mike Peake - The Times

Molotov's Magic Lantern: A Journey in Russian History by Rachel Polonsky

What I am reading - Mr Floyd

This is an unusual book. Rachel Polonsky weaves together many different stories, from many different times. She writes sharply about the present day, as in these lines about the Manege, a huge exhibition hall close to the Kremlin: `A few years ago, on the March night of Putin's second election to the presidency, the Manege caught fire. (No one thought the catastrophe was accidental. The Mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, produced plans for a renovation - complete with three floors of underground parking - the very next morning.) The wind blew pieces of flaming roofbeams [...] into Romanov [the street where the Polonsky family was then living], where they dropped, burning, on the asphalt, and smouldered into ash beneath our windows.' She writes movingly about the Soviet past, about Varlam Shalamov (the Primo Levi of the Gulag) and his admiration for the poet Osip Mandelstam. I was still more struck by her account of the lives of two important scientists. Sergei Vavilov, a physicist, became President of the Academy of Sciences. His more talented and more idealistic brother Nikolai, a biologist, was arrested in 1940. Polonsky quotes a fellow-prisoner's description of how, in a narrow, overcrowded basement prison cell, Nikolai `tried to cheer up his companions... he arranged a series of lectures on history, biology and the timber industry. Each of them delivered a lecture in turn. They had to speak in a very low voice.' Sergei, meanwhile, petitioned unsuccessfully for his brother's release. The story of the painful compromises he made with the Soviet authorities is as moving as the story of his brother's heroism: `Two years later, Sergei Vavilov sat up all night [...], smoking through several packets of cigarettes, asking himself whether to accept the post of president of the Academy [of Sciences], or to allow the appointment of Stalin's favourite Trofim Lysenko and the further devastation of Soviet science and agriculture.'
Polonsky is at once a travel writer, a supremely well-read literary historian and a brilliant anthologist. In the course of Molotov's Magic Lantern we read about her encounters, both in their books and in towns where they lived, with a large number of both well-known and little-known writers, priests, scientists and politicians. Time and again she presents us with memorable quotations from and about these figures. Here, for example, is one of her heroes, the scholar Dmitry Likhachev, writing about Dostoevsky, `He would catch hold of a fact, a place, a chance meeting or a newspaper report, and give it a continuation. He would populate the streets, open the doors into apartments, go down into cellars, make up biographies for the people he passed in the streets.' Dostoevsky's genius, according to Likhachev, was not `to structure a reality, but to structure his novels around reality.' Polonsky's concern is with real, rather than fictional, lives, but she too has a gift for catching hold of unexpected facts, going down into cellars, opening doors we would otherwise never notice ...
One chapter is devoted to Novgorod the Great - once the most important of Russia's several mediaeval city-states. Polonsky writes that it is `the genius of Novgorod's geography to accommodate wilderness in well-populated space.' Molotov's Magic Lantern is a complex and subtle work, but its variety of historical perspectives and its many layers of literary allusion do not prevent it too from accommodating both brutality and wildness - on the contrary, they enable the reader to imagine both Soviet brutality and Russian wildness more vividly.

Top 10 Books of All Time ??

What a daunting task it would be to write a list like this, but fortunately for us, Norton (of the Norton Anthologies) asked 125 of the greatest living writers to select their top 10, and then (using statistics) produced a final list of the ten greatest books ever written. I certainly agree with the majority of the selections.

This is a list of the top 10 fictional books of all time – needless to say, if you have not read these books, you probably should.

10. Middlemarch - George Eliot
Middlemarch is considered by many scholars to be one of the most important novels of the Victorian era. It was written by George Eliot (pen name of Mary Anne Evans) and was first published in 1871 to 1872. It is set in the 1830s in Middlemarch, a fictional provincial town in England, based on Coventry.

9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov - Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov was a Russian short story writer and playwright. He was born in Taganrog, southern Russia, on 29 January 1860. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later employed by Virginia Woolf and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure.

8. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
I appreciate the great artistic merit in Proust’s writing, but I have to be honest and say that I have never managed to get more than half way through the first book of this multiple-book novel. I found it extremely slow paced and boring. This is Proust’s most prominent work, it is popularly known for its extended length and the notion of involuntary memory, the most famous example being the “episode of the madeleine” in which he describes in great (boring) detail, eating a madeleine dipped in tea.

7. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
I agree with the inclusion of this book – it is one of my favorites and one of the best examples of Fitzgerald’s writing. The Great Gatsby is a tale from the Jazz age of Gatsby – a wealthy man whose life is surrounded by mystery. A brilliant read.

6. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
It is no surprise that Mr Shakespeare is on the list. I am not sure that I would have picked Hamlet as his best book, but who am I to debate 125 brilliant authors? Hamlet is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, probably written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle for murdering Hamlet’s father, the King, gaining the throne through this treachery, and subsequently marrying his mother.

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
It is good to see such a great book for the younger generation on the list. Huckleberry Finn is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer (hero of three other Mark Twain books).

4. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita was first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris. The novel is both internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book’s narrator and protagonist Humbert Humbert becoming obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.

3. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace was first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russkii Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy’s two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world’s greatest novels.

2. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialised in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made it notorious. The novel focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel’s true art lies in its details and hidden patterns.

1. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina is widely regarded as a pinnacle in realist fiction, Tolstoy considered this book his first true novel. Although most Russian critics panned the novel on its publication as a “trifling romance of high life,” Fyodor Dostoevsky declared it to be “flawless as a work of art.” Tolstoy’s style in Anna Karenina is considered by many critics to be transitional, forming a bridge between the realist and modernist novel.


Afterword
Obviously a list of this type is very subjective and it is likely to cause discomfort to many people. We are priveleged on this site to have such a great variety of generally very smart readers. I am very interested to know what your top 10 – or even your number 1 – books are. Do you agree with this list? If not, tell us who should be here and tell us why they should be here.

10 Ways to Improve Your Mind by Reading the Classics

According to a Jenkins Group survey, 42% of University graduates will never read another book. Since most people read bestsellers printed in the past 10 years, it follows that virtually no one is reading the classics. Although it is unfortunate that the intellectual heritage of humanity is being forgotten, we can use this to our benefit. By reading the classics to improve your mind, you can give yourself an advantage. These examples illustrate 10 ways reading the classics will help you succeed.

1. Bigger Vocabulary
When reading the classics you will come across many words that are no longer commonly used. Why learn words most people don’t use? To set yourself apart. Having a bigger vocabulary is like having a toolbox with more tools. A larger arsenal of words enables you to express yourself more eloquently. You will be able to communicate with precision and create a perception of higher intelligence that will give you an advantage in work and social situations.

2. Improved Writing Ability
Reading the classics is the easiest way to improve your writing. While reading you unconsciously absorb the grammar and style of the author. Why not learn from the best? Great authors have a tendency to take over your mind. After reading, I have observed that my thoughts begin to mirror the writer’s style. This influence carries over to writing, helping form clear, rhythmic sentences.

3. Improved Speaking Ability
Becoming a better speaker accompanies becoming a better writer because both are caused by becoming a better thinker. Studying works of genius will teach you to express yourself with clarity and style. By improving your command of the English language, you will become more persuasive, sound more intelligent, and enjoy an advantage over less articulate people.

4. Fresh Ideas
Isn’t it ironic that the best sources for new ideas are writers who have been dead for centuries? I have derived some of my best ideas directly from the classics. It makes sense when you consider the competition. Everyone you know is reading the same popular blogs and bestselling books. Observing the same ideas as everyone else leads to generic and repetitive thinking. No wonder it is difficult to sound original! By looking to the classics for inspiration, you can enhance your creativity and find fresh subject matter.

5. Historical Perspective
I could argue this point myself, but why bother if Einstein has already done it?
Somebody who reads only newspapers and at best the books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely nearsighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. Moreover, what a person thinks on his own without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of other people is even in the best case rather paltry and monotonous.
There are only a few enlightened people with a lucid mind and style and with good taste within a century. What has been preserved of their work belongs among the most precious possessions of humankind. Nothing is more needed than to overcome the modernist’s snobbishness.

6. Educational Entertainment
Reading great books is fun. The key is getting past the initial vocabulary barrier. It is actually less difficult than you think. Even challenging authors use a limited vocabulary. After the initial learning curve, you will find the classics as readable as modern books and infinitely more stimulating. Classics have endured because of entertainment value. There is a reason filmmakers keep remaking old books — they have the best content.

7. Sophistication
If you would like to excel in conversation, knowledge of the classics is essential. These books keep coming up. They are a part of human history that is not going to disappear in 10 years like 99% of books on the bestsellers list. By reading the classics, you gain a deeper appreciation of ideas generally taken for granted. In addition, quoting Aristotle or Voltaire is a great way to win an argument.

8. More Efficient Reading
I just finished reading The Road by Cormac MacCarthy. It is so good that it won the Pulitzer Prize. Afterwards I read the first few chapters of Lolita . I was shocked by Lolita’s superiority. Truly great books do not come around every year. If you only read contemporary literature, you are drawing from a diluted pool. Why not make the most of your reading time by finding the best of the best?

9. Develop a Distinct Voice
If you are a writer/blogger, ignoring the classics is a mistake. This has nothing to do with subject matter. Regardless of what you write about, you need to be persuasive and develop a distinct voice. The best way to learn is from the masters. I have seen several articles recommend examples of good writing — they have all been other blogs. I have a feeling most people reading this article already read enough blogs. Spending some time with the classics will give you an edge.

10. Learn Timeless Ideas
We like to believe, in our modern arrogance, that technology has changed everything. In truth, it feels the same to be alive today as it did a thousand years ago. The lessons of the classics carry as much weight as ever. They contain information that is directly applicable to your life. Don’t believe me? Try reading Ben Franklin’s Autobiography without learning something. Reading the classics develops an understanding of the human condition and a deeper appreciation of modern problems.

In closing, I would like to briefly anticipate criticism. This is not an attack on everything modern. To read nothing but the classics would be as foolish as completely ignoring them. The aim is to combine the wisdom of the past with the innovation of the future. The two are inextricably linked — the best books are yet to be written.
In addition, this is not an appeal to snobbery. Quite the opposite. Reading the classics is a cheap hobby. Used copies can be borrowed from the library or purchased for 1/20 the cost of trendy books that are the talk of high society.