Well everyone, I'm only one week away from finishing the Teen Reading challenge. Lots of other librarians and readers are participating, reading as many young adult books as we can within a three month period. It's a great reason to read all those books I meant to get to as a teenager, and I rather like having an adult perspective now.

Somehow, I managed to get through high school and college without reading J.D. Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye. I have now rectified this situation with pleasing results. Narrator Holden Caufield is sixteen years old in 1945. Although an intelligent boy, his bad grades get him expelled from his most recent fancy prep school. Unwilling to face his parents right away, Holden checks into a New York hotel not far from his family's apartment. After several awkward attempts to connect with adults and friends his own age, Holden visits his little sister Phoebe, the only person he really seems to communicate with. Although things don't work out exactly as Holden planned them, he realizes how troubled he is, and that he needs help with his passage into adulthood.

The language and style of the writing are what really impressed me. Holden comes off as just what he is - a teenager with troubles who's trying to figure out life. The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most commonly challenged books (books people ask to be restricted or removed from a library) due to profanity, sexuality, and encouraging teen rebellion, but also makes Top 100 book lists everywhere and has won countless awards worldwide. I say read it and judge for yourself.

NBCC Awards: The National Book Critics Circle awards honor the best literature published in English in six categories—autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Announced in March, check out some of the winners for the 2010 publishing year:

Fiction - Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Biography - Sarah Bakewell, How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty         Attempts at an Answer

Autobiography - Darin Strauss, Half a Life

Poetry -  C. D. Wright’s One with Others: [a little book of her days]

Non-Fiction - Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Criticism - Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West

I just put The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls on request at the library. Several people have told me how much they enjoyed the book, which is a memoir of her nomadic and difficult upbringing, and I have been intending to read it for a while. Why now?

I finished Walls's Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel last week and loved it. Based on the life of her grandmother Lily Casey Smith, the book contains true stories that have been fictionalized in order to flesh out and paint the missing details of Lily's remarkable life. Born in 1901 on farmland in Texas, Lily learns to accept challenges as they come. By age 15 she leaves home to teach school, goes to Chicago on her own in her 20's, marries and works night and day on a ranch with her family - she is always doing, always thinking, always making her way. The writing is engaging and short chapters flow easily from one to the other. With all the obstacles standing in her way, I was just so impressed with Lily's gumption and make-it-happen attitude.

A couple of people told me it was helpful to read this book before The Glass Castle, as it explains quite a bit of background (even if it is fictionalized). Guess I'll find out when my copy arrives!

For anyone who likes Agatha Christie or similar books, check out the 2010 Agatha Award Nominees at Malice Domestic. Here's the basic information:

The Agatha Awards honor the "traditional mystery." That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others. For our purposes, the genre is loosely defined as mysteries that:

• contain no explicit sex
• contain no excessive gore or gratuitous violence