Top Twenty Fantasy Series . . .

So, with all of this talk about fantasy, I'm going to finally try to nail down my top ten series.  (What's the plural of "series"?)

1. Harry Potter/JK Rowling - a classic witch and wizard fantasy.  MG, lots of fun.  If you haven't read this series, you should.  
2. Lord of the Rings/JRR Tolkien - another classic.  Longer and more challenging than Harry, but richer and darker in some ways.  Written by a scholar of medieval literature.  So many brilliant details.  Movies are classics as well, but the books are still better (and that's saying something!).
3. Narnia/CS Lewis - yet another classic.  Fast and easy to read, and just plain good storytelling.  Lots of surprises and strange twists.  Some of the later books are bizarre.
4. His Dark Materials/Philip Pullman - takes place in a strange alternate universe with some bizarre twists.  Some people think it's anti-Christian because of the negative depiction of some of the angels later in the series.  Still a good story.
5. Abhorsen/Garth Nix - brilliant and dark, with some really scary depictions of the world of the dead.  About a series of heroes who can walk into the land of the dead.  Feels more real than many other fantasies, mostly because death is real.  
6. Fablehaven/Brandon Mull - the characters are lots of fun, and there are a ton of imaginative surprises.  Two kids find out that grandma and grandpa run a kind of nature preserve for magical creatures.  And they feel obliged to protect ALL of the magical creatures, even the bad ones.  Book 4 has one of my favorite surprises of any book that I've ever read.  Don't want to give it away, but it was worth reading four books to get there.  
7. Lightning Thief/Rick Riordan - the movie almost ruined this series for me, but it's a fun fantasy based on the Greek gods and goddesses.  Lots of cool applications of mythology.  The hero, Percy Jackson, is the son of Poseidon and a mortal, and he's sent on several quests.  I enjoyed all seven books.  
8. False Prince/Jennifer Nielsen - No magic needed here.  More like medieval adventure.  It's about a plot to take over a kingdom using a fake prince.  I've read both of the two books that have come out, and both were really good.  The main character is a pleasant blend of pragmatic rule-breaking and naive virtue.  Looking forward to the third book.
9. Sea of Trolls/Nancy Farmer - Farmer is an incredible storyteller.  She has a gift for carefully crafting character and orchestrating believable adventures.  Lots of terrible evil monsters, and Farmer does a good job turning characters around, making them seem really bad, then really good, then really bad, as the story progresses.
10. Bartimaeus/Jonathan Stroud - In this series, wizards run Great Britain by summoning demons and making them do their bidding.  They really have very little power without them.  Bartimaeus, who narrates, is a demon, talking about demons and wizards.  It's an original approach, and Stroud makes it funny and interesting.  
11. Curse Workers/Holly Black - A nice blend of mafia narrative, alternate reality, and magic.  Some people have the ability to work magic through their hands, and it takes place in an alternate present, with an alternate American history that includes concentration "camps" for these magic people, discriminatory laws, and a whole subculture of criminal magic workers.  The main character is a shady curse worker with power he doesn't quite understand.  Lots of mystery and fun.
12. Resurrection of Magic/Kathleen Duey - This series is strange and dark, and I'm excited about the third book in the series.  It's two overlapping stories, one about a young woman who's a natural adept with magic, and a young man who is sent to a magic school to learn magic - only the school swallows up children and often refuses to spit them out as wizards.  I really like the way that the story develops about where magic comes from, and the twisted way in which it is taught at the strange school.  There's a lot of mystery and evil here.  It's good.
13. Earthsea/Ursula Le Guin - The rules of magic are strange in this series, and people can lose their magic ability if they do too much.  Magic is based on a language, which happens to be the language of dragons, and there's a lot of work and study involved.  I like that kind of twist.  The series of books includes some strange stories, and Le Guin's imagination is vast.  I enjoyed the tension in this series a lot.  
14. Chronicles of Prydain/William Alexander - This series is kind of young, but it's fun, with some old-fashioned storytelling structure thrown in.  It feels like an "old" tale, like Tolkien, though it's not quite as dark, and perhaps not quite as detailed.  But it's a good series of tales.  
15. Graceling/Kristin Cashore - This is a quirky, character-driven fantasy story about a super-strong female fighter who faces an evil king.  There are some twists and turns, but she tells a really good story with some fun fight scenes.
16. Finnikin of the Rock/Melina Marchetta - Marchetta is a gifted writer, and her Jellicoe Road is a great story and a Printz Honor book.  This is YA fantasy much like Abhorsen, with the story told from the point of view of someone who doesn't really know magic, but who fears it.  It's dark, and there are a lot of scary things in this fantasy universe.  I enjoyed it a lot.  
17. Shadow and Bone/Leigh Bardugo - This is a relatively new entry here, and it's a weird premise.  There are people with special types of magical power, called Grisha, and the main character discovers that she has one of the magical powers.  But there's an evil dark cloud that is spreading over part of the country, destroying land and people, and strange monsters are breeding inside the darkness.  The main character is asked to help fight the darkness, only the person asking her to fight it is not such a nice guy, really.  It's really dark, and really cool.
18. Ranger's Apprentice/John Flanagan - This is a cool series about a kid who becomes a Ranger, one of the king's special forces, so to speak, who help lead his army, maintain peace and order, and serve the interests of the king.  There are several different villains throughout the series, but the Ranger himself doesn't really have his own magic.  It's a fun story (at least it was fun for the first five books) about a kid with no prospects becoming a powerful leader.  
19. Chronicles of Ancient Darkness/Michelle Paver - This is a strange story about a kid whose father is killed by a "demon," and who spends several books fighting for revenge against the demon.  The kid lives in the woods in a hunter-gatherer society, with some clans and villages that he has relationships with.  It's cooler than it sounds, and full of action.
20. Amulet/Kazu Kibuishi - This is the only graphic novel series on the list, but it's a great story about a magic amulet that falls into the hands of a girl who isn't sure if she can trust it.  Apparently, the amulet could be both a blessing and a curse.  She enters a different universe through the basement of her new house, and she sets out on a quest to help the people of this universe.  It's a good story with some fantastic art, and it has several mind-blowing moments.  

I tried to stick to series where I read more than one book, though I haven't quite finished the second book in the Grisha series (Shadow and Bone).  And there's a lot of diversity on this list.  Most people would consider the Chronicles of Narnia as an elementary-level fantasy (perhaps even a thinly veiled Christian allegory).  Several other titles on the list would be better described as YA or high-school fantasy.  Resurrection of Magic is dark and disturbing in places (I've called it the meanest depiction of teaching I've ever read, where the teachers of magic force the students to learn magic to eat or starve to death trying.)  I'm also fairly certain that there are a lot of great fantasy series out there that I haven't read.  (I would love to hear about those!)  I've said elsewhere (on Twitter, I think) that I don't often read series anymore.  It's becoming less common, though it still happens.  An example of this would be Ranger's Apprentice.  I read the first five books and enjoyed them.  I'm not sure why I never really got into the sixth book.  Now there are twelve books, and a spinoff series.  I might never read those (although the first book in the new series, the Brotherband Chronicles, recently made it to the Caudill list.  I might read it just because of that, though I'm dragging my feet a little.)

Why read fantasy fiction?

I know that not everyone likes to read fantasy, and I understand a lot of the stereotypes.  I've heard more than my share of jokes about Frodo and hobbits.  But I think that the purpose of fantasy fiction (at least for me) goes a lot deeper - or perhaps wider - than just escapism.

When I was younger, I wasn't a big reader of fantasy.  I read a lot of science fiction and "classics."  Later, when I became a graduate student in English, reading became work, and I only read books that were related to my research interests or assigned.  What changed my reading habits?  Harry Potter.

I've talked about and written about Harry before, and I'm sure that we've all developed our own relationships with the Boy Who Lived.  For me, it was a little display at Borders (ouch!) with the three books that were out at the time.  There was a sign that made me think these books were popular.  I decided to check out the first book.  I read the whole thing in a day.  It was easy to read, short (at least the first book was), and fun.  I ended up reading the entire series, re-reading all of the books every time another installment came out, and even standing in line at Borders (again!) the night the final book came out.

Since then, I've become a middle school literacy teacher, so reading YA fantasy can be considered "work" again, but it's much more fun work than trying to wade through yet another book about William Faulkner (which was my unfinished dissertation topic).  I've also become something of a specialist in YA fantasy and science fiction.  It seems like these two subgenres are my "comfort zone." Much of what I read for fun falls into either of these categories.  Here's a partial list of fantasy books/series that I've read:

Harry Potter (of course)
Lightning Thief
Lord of the Rings
Fablehaven
Books of Pellinor
Resurrection of Magic
Inheritance
Keys to the Kingdom
Abhorsen
Curse Workers
Demon's Lexicon
Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Amulet
Chronicles of Ancient Darkness
Faerie Wars
Gone
Wake
Bartimaeus
Alchemyst
Earthsea
Boneshaker
His Dark Materials
Narnia
Tuck Everlasting
Replacement
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
Raven Boys
Girl of Fire and Thorns
Chronicles of Prydain
Powerless
Sea of Trolls
Sandman
Peter and the Starcatchers
False Prince
Shadow and Bone
Chime
Marbury Lens
Finnikin of the Rock
Hold Me Closer, Necromancer
Dragon Slippers
Jinx
Magic Thief
Lord Loss
Last Apprentice
Warrior Heir
Chronicles of Prydain
Redwall
Glass Houses
Uglies
Fallen
Summoning
Evermore
Graceling
Artemis Fowl
Marked
Forest of Hands and Teeth
Eighth Grade Bites
Vampire Diaries
Merchant of Death
Midnight for Charlie Bone
If I Stay
Before I Fall
Shiver
Ranger's Apprentice
Gifts
Mortal Instruments
Elsewhere
Madapple
Great and Terrible Beauty
Tithe
Twilight
Iron King
Bone
Graveyard Book
Beyonders
Red Pyramid
Lost Hero
Septimus Heap

I didn't include any science fiction (except where it wasn't clearly only science fiction or fantasy.  For example, Artemis Fowl is kind of a mix of science fiction and fantasy).  I also didn't include any grown-up fantasy (like the Dresden files or Terry Pratchet's Discworld books).

So, what's so great about "fantasy" that doesn't apply to other kinds of YA fiction?

1. Fantasy tends to be weirder, with stranger characters and unusual situations.  For example, the Curse Workers series by Holly Black takes place in a universe with a section of the population that can do magic with their hands.  One of the main characters' relatives, for example, can kill people just by touching them.  As a result, everyone wears gloves, and it's considered indecent to show people your naked hands.  Isn't that weird?  
2. Fantasy tends to be much longer, often stretched over several books, giving a much fuller sense of fictional reality, character, and story development.  Harry Potter's books span seven years, and the Harry who fights Voldemort in the seventh book is very different from the little kid who sleeps under the stairs at the Dursley's.  Sometimes this can be a fault. (I'm thinking of books that just ramble on and on, as if trying to fill pages, or that end strangely, to encourage readers to pick up the sequels.)
3. Fantasy isn't afraid to be epic, to have delusions of grandeur, and to talk about the struggle between good and evil or the end of the world.  It doesn't have to be - and this is perhaps the most often lampooned characteristic of the subgenre - but it often is.  This is probably my favorite thing about fantasy.  There are usually "bad guys," and they are usually really bad.  Voldemort is a sociopath who kills and tortures because he enjoys it.  Increasingly, there are more ambiguously good heroes.  Curse Workers is a nice example - Cassel Sharpe, the main character, is connected to a powerful crime family, and commits several crimes throughout the books.  Sage/Jaron, the main character in The False Prince/Runaway King, is a thief.  

I think a lot of these things are also true of science fiction.  I also think that some of the lines between the two subgenres are blurring.  Interworld is a good example of this - it's about the struggle between a magic-based society and a science-based society, and maintaining a balance between the two.  

I would never say that fantasy is the only kind of "good book" out there.  I've read a lot of other books that were awesome.  And there are a lot of "grown-up" fantasies that are fantastic and popular.  I know we've all heard of Game of Thrones, but The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is a really good fantasy that hasn't yet become a movie or HBO series (though it would make a great film).  And we all also know that turning something into a movie doesn't mean that the book was awesome (Twilight comes to mind) or that the movie/series will be great (Dresden Files comes to mind).  

Anyway, I've been planning a top ten list for some time.  I'll be working on that next.  

Summer Reading programs?

At my school, we provide each grade level of students a list of books and ask them to choose and read one book from the list.  Our summer reading list looks like this for 2013:

All the Lovely Bad Ones by Mary Downing Hahn
Tears of a Tiger by Sharon Draper
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
Legend by Marie Lu
Greetings from Nowhere by Barbara O'Connor
Shug by Jenny Han

This is for incoming 7th graders.  We typically announce the list to students in the last few weeks of school, and we visit classes to promote the books and encourage students to read over the summer.  (I did a survey about this a few years back, and I found that other than the obvious factors - like access to the books - the single biggest predictor of whether a kid read over the summer or not was if a teacher encouraged him/her to do so.  These talks make a big difference.)

We put a lot of thought into this over the years, and I think that our students benefit from the narrow list of choices that (hopefully) includes at least one reasonably appropriate book for them. We try to diversify the list so that virtually every reading niche can be filled.  For example, Shug is kind of a "girl" book.  It's a realistic fiction novel about a young woman who is in love with her (male) neighbor and former best friend, and who deals with the awkward realization that he might not like her in that way, but still want to be her friend.  Legend is either a "nerd" book or a "boy" book, depending on how you spin it.  It has a lot of sci-fi action (and some romance - don't tell the boys).  We also try to level the books appropriately.  All the Lovely Bad Ones is a 670 Lexile or about a 5th grade reading level.  It's also less than 200 pages long.  Legend is slightly higher-level in terms of text complexity, but the subject is more difficult to comprehend and requires more abstract thinking (dystopian future).  It's also 330 pages.  Mockingbird is deceptively simple: it's told from the perspective of a girl with spectrum disorder, and requires a lot of careful, inferential reading to understand events through her distorted filter.  It can be a difficult (but rewarding) read.

My son's district sends a list of state award nominations and asks students to choose and read a book from these lists.  There are many more choices, but it would be more difficult for teachers to keep up with such a long list, and almost as difficult to connect these books to some kind of classroom learning once summer is over.  I think that would be less useful for us.  Our area high school has a single title that is "required" summer reading for incoming freshmen.  This allows for a series of assignments or classroom activities connected to this book, and I'm sure that the high school knows and teaches the book very well, when everyone is asked to read the same thing.  But it also reduces the opportunity to differentiate (or let students self-differentiate), and it allows for less engagement and "buy-in," since the students are all being forced to read the same thing without regard to interest.  (And what if they've already read the book?)

So, I think the program should reflect the purpose.  Our ostensible purpose is to have kids continue reading over the summer to reduce losses in fluency and/or reading comprehension.  Over the years, most of the reading teachers in the building have developed other ways to employ the summer reading, from "book talks" to the class, to creating products about these books, to mini "book groups" around the selected summer reading book, to "book trailers."  I typically prefer to use summer reading books to dive right into teaching effective collaboration and discussion, group work procedures at the beginning of the year, and as a way to informally assess interest and reading level early in the year, before much of the initial testing data is available.

Finally, I also have to admit that I really enjoy "shopping" for summer reading titles, and I've been known to make wild suggestions to throw out the whole list and start over.  We experiment a lot, and we often pull titles from the Rebecca Caudill list for our summer reading.  Most of the titles on our list came from the Caudill nominations at some point or other, a list that I am again trying to read in its entirety.  I am getting ready to discuss the books with 6th graders tomorrow - let's hope it goes well!