May 11-17 is “Reading is Fun Week,†run by Reading Is Fundamental , an organization that works to get books into the hands of children so that they can discover the joys of reading. As a youth services librarian, I often tell parents that their child will be a better reader if they read more, and a key to this is to make sure they are reading for fun. This doesn’t just apply to elementary school kids, though. Young adults and adults should be reading for fun, too. Now this got me wondering…do teens read for fun? Come to think of it…do I read for fun?
One thing I do not remember doing much of when I was in high school was reading for the fun of it. In fact, it took a while for me to remember reading anything other than what was assigned to me in school. I really had to think about it for a while before remembering that I actually read a lot of books for fun when I was a teen. I read R.L. Stine and fantasy books, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and I started to get more into adult fiction because there just weren’t as many Young Adult books and authors back in those days. Today, publishers and authors have tapped into the Young Adult market in a way I wish they had when I was in high school.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, and because I am a poetry lover myself, I wanted to share some YA fiction titles in which a major character reads and/or writes poetry. If you are reading this blog entry, then you probably enjoy poetry too. And if you are like me – who has not kept the promise she made to herself some time ago to read a poem every day – you could do with some inspiration. 
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
