Blog and online fiction recommendations for high schoolers?

[jenett]

So, I'm working on a series of booklists to encourage students to read and explore cool stuff over break. I'm trying to figure out which things to suggest online - they should be of interest to high school students and not likely to either overwhelm them or make their parents desperately unhappy.

Fiction already on my list:
- Shadow Unit
- The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making

Comics:
- Girl Genius
- Gunnerkrigg Court
- Leanne's Autumnside and Winterside ;)

Most of my reading tends toward the more-geeky side of the spectrum, and I'd like a wider variety.

Anyone got suggestions? General content blogs, blogs about books, etc. are particularly welcome.

(Also, in work-preening, I have just managed to get one of our sophmores hooked on papersky's books. Go us! (Jo for writing them, student for having taste, and me for putting them together, or something.))

Comments

[maribou]

This might be too obvious, but John Green (a really good YA novelist) and his brother Hank have a Youtube channel vlogbrothers that has a HYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOJ teen following. (Though, kinda geeky. But, geeks cooler than I was in high school...)

He also has done some metafictional stuff online, but I don't know links for that.

http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers

They talk about books and other very-contenty-stuff (science, politics, the environment) inbetween all the craziness and community-building.

I have about 30 blogs in my "fav book blogs" bookmarks folder, and would be happy to send you links for all of them if you *want* (annotated, even!), but here are 3 I think are very teen-friendly:

1) bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com - this is a YA librarian writing mostly about YA books in a very funny and straightforward voice. And she reads VERY widely, lots of mainstream YA, not just the geek-love stuff. I think the Book Highlights of 2009 - http://bookshelvesofdoom.blogs.com/bookshelves_of_doom/2010/01/my-literary-highlights-of-2009.html - links to enough of her reviews to give you a very good idea of her voice. Also she has a lot of links to funny videos, trailers for teen movies, etc.... It may just be my favorite blog-of-someone-I-don't-know on the entire internet.

2) http://www.thingsmeanalot.com/ - this is pretty intellectual but I don't think it comes off as aloof. The books themselves aren't super-intellectual (To Say Nothing of the Dog, The Blue Castle, Mules and Men, Ella Minnow Pea), just the reviewer is superbrilliant. But she really thinks deeply and writes compellingly but accessibly about what she reads. If someone had presented me with this blog at the age of 17 I would have fallen for the WWW even harder than I did. For the lit-geek kids maybe?

3) http://www.citizenreader.com/citizen/ - Citizen Reader mostly reads nonfiction and her reviews are funny and incisive, mostly fairly short with clean sharp sentences. If you have kids looking for NF options, this blog would be GREAT!

[maribou]

Not sure this won't freak out the parents, but I've recently started reading The Lesbrary - all the reviews are of lesbian or other queer-girl-themed books: http://lesbrary.wordpress.com/about/ and I really like it!!


Also if you want to see an example of vlogbrothers book-related cleverness (albeit one that does not feature THEM in their charming goofiness):
http://www.youtube.com/user/vlogbrothers#p/u/7/AbprAKGAg8U