10 New Young Adult Books for Summer 2013

Whether your summer destination is the beach, the mountains or the same old routine, these top new YA titles will help entertain you through the season. Read on for our recommendations at Bookish.com now!

Now in addition to categorizing books by whether or not you’ve read them, you can add books to your own personal shelves.

HOW IT WORKS

Find a book you want to keep track of and click the “ADD TO MY SHELF” button.

Click “CREATE SHELF”, enter a new shelf name in the box and hit ENTER; your personal shelf will be created and the book automatically added to it.

Group any of your books by subjects, events, themes, or whatever makes the most sense to you.

We’ll be adding more functionality to these shelves. If you have feedback, please let us know!

The Bookish Product Team

Log in to Bookish and start creating custom shelves!

Now it’s your turn: What would your coming-of-age memoir be called and what would it be about?

Send us your story and we might send you to BAM!

How to enter:

Send us the title you would give your own coming-of-age mini-memoir, along with a summary for it of up to 100 words. Make it funny, honest, touching–all the things we love in a good memoir.

What you’ll win:

The writers of the two winning entries will each receive a pair of VIP tickets to “Radio Diaries: Teenage Diaries Revisited,” a special live multimedia event on May 6, 2013, at 7:30pm at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) in Brooklyn, NY. VIP admission includes a special pre-show reception at 6pm in the BAM Fisher lobby with Ira Glass, Joe Richman, and the diarists.

Additionally, Bookish will create a cover image for each of the winning entries and we’ll post the winning entries and runners-up on our web site.

Deadline and rules:

Entries must be sent via email to contest@bookish.com by midnight ET on Wednesday, May 1, 2013. No purchase necessary. The editors of Bookish will judge this contest. For full rules and eligibility information, click here.

More About “Radio Diaries”

“Teenage Diaries Revisited” will be hosted by Ira Glass of “This American Life” and Joe Richman of “Radio Diaries,” kicking off the new NPR series “Teenage Diaries Revisited.” At the event, three diarists who revealed their lives to millions of listeners 16 years ago will present sneak previews of their new diaries about where their lives are now.

Bookish is proud to partner with Radio Diaries to present

“Radio Diaries: Teenage Diaries Revisited.”

Have you checked out the Bookish Essentials lists? There are hundreds of editorially curated lists across themes, topics, genres and authors!

2. Looking for a new book for the kid in your life? You can’t go wrong with an award winner! This week, writer and illustrator Jon Klassen won the 2013 Caldecott Medal for his illustrated book “This Is Not My Hat.” And Katherine Applegate received the 2013 Newbery Medal for “The One and Only Ivan.”

3. If you were to make a perfume for your favorite author, which scents would you include? Vanilla? Sandalwood? Tobacco? Check out what perfumes Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allen Poe and other writers might smell like.

4. Well, it’s not East Egg, but “The Great Gatsby” writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Baltimore townhouse is on sale. If you have a spare $450,000 hanging around, it can be all yours!

5. We here at Bookish HQ firmly believe in the power of books to change lives, but can reading fiction actually make you a better person? A team of scientists say that “getting lost in a book” can make you a more empathetic person.

6. Our pals over at USA Today did an illuminating interview with Rev Run aka Joseph Simmons and actor Tyrese Gibson who’ve written a book claiming to unlock the secret of the male mind.

7. Simon & Schuster has announced the winner to their “Fahrenheit 451” cover design contest. We love the winning entry’s bold design and provocative concept. The cover will appear on the 60th anniversary edition of the Ray Bradbury classic.

You’d think there wouldn’t be much to a comic full of zombies, monkeys and jokes about creamed corn, but then again, it’s hard to overlook the pulp-influenced spunk in a book like “The Goon.” That’s not to say that anyone is ignoring what the series has to offer, either: Recently, creator Eric Powell and director David Fincher took to Kickstarter and raised more than $400,000 for the book’s film adaptation. So, here’s a look at the best books to discover before “The Goon” hits Hollywood.

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“The Goon Volume 1: Nothin’ But Misery,” by Eric Powell
To understand all that “The Goon” has to offer, it’s ideal to start with this introduction. “Nothing But Misery” establishes the various characters of the series, while presenting the tragic back story of the enigmatic Buzzard. With each chapter, a bit more of the world is exposed, from the trouble down by the docks to bad memories in Chinatown — even a bit of Psychic Seal who just won’t stop running his mouth. “The Goon” shifts its tone to fit a variety of situations — such as when Goon and Franky meet Santa — but it’s worth noting that Powell makes it all believable.

“The Goon Volume 2: My Murderous Childhood and Other Grievous Years,” by Eric Powell
In any other setting, the Goon might be the bad guy. After the death of a local crime boss, our hero trudges into the city with the plan to take over the protection racket for himself. But underneath that, there’s a real sense of honor and decency, something that separates him from the riff-raff and paranormal villains that plague his town. Seeing how it all starts, when Goon meets Franky, helps to contrast an honest thug with, well, a zombie priest.

“The Goon Volume 3: Heaps of Ruination,” by Eric Powell
To casual comic book readers, there may be some overlap between the supernatural hijinks in “The Goon” and the paranormal disturbances battled by Hellboy. Lucky for us, a well-positioned crossover pits the two against the Communist Airborne Mollusk Militia, which should be enough violence to definitively smash any rift between what’s Lovecraftian fantasy and what’s an homage to pulp-horror comics. Then again, fans of both will love this trade, so maybe it doesn’t matter who winds up kicking undead butt.

“The Goon Volume 6: Chinatown and the Mystery of Mr. Wicker,” by Eric Powell
Sure, the presence of a skunk-ape driven into a murderous rage over pie or a swamp ogre with a love of inflatable chickens does give “The Goon” a sort of dark whimsy, but none of that takes away from the book’s emotional depth and sparse, yet effective, character development. Chinatown finally explains the significance of Goon’s scars, both physical and mental, by offering a look at where the man has been and what that means for his future. It’s a seminal read, bolstered by Powell’s artwork.

“The Goon Volume 8: Those That is Damned,” by Eric Powell
With all of the slackjaws, vampires and succubi, there’s only one spectre that the Goon truly fears: Labrazio. This means it’s not exactly great news that someone has reanimated the mobster’s corpse and sent him after everything the gang holds dear. But, years of fighting dark magic have helped Goon and Franky assemble a dangerous crew of allies to put an end to whoever or whatever created this new, blue Labrazio. This is the culmination of the first decade of “The Goon,” and it’s an ideal gateway to the rest of the series.

–By Joseph Heflich

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Techno-thriller mega-author Neal Stephenson is the guru of futuristic science fiction, yet his main concerns are down-to-earth–the over-hopping of beer and the increasingly non-motile lifestyle of desk jockeys. But despite (or perhaps because of) his eccentric worries, he caters to a vast, rapt audience. Ever since his smash cyberpunk hit “Snow Crash,” he’s been stirring up the fiction world with his doorstopper novels — from Victorian-era magical adventures in his Baroque Cycle series to “Anathem,” a far-future space epic about a cloistered group of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. Last year, he launched through his startup, Subutai, an online publishing project in which the novel’s content is crowd-sourced. Stephenson’s writing is dense, confounding and utterly readable. In his most recent novel, “REAMDE,” we’re plunged into the world of massive multiplayer online gaming (fanboys, try to stay calm), and the dangers inherent in gold farming (accumulating in-game currency and items to sell to wealthy gamers for real cash). Bookish got the chance to pick the sci fi icon’s brain.

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Bookish: Techno-thrillers are clearly your forte, and this time, you feature the popular world of multiplayer online gaming. Do you play yourself?

Neal Stephenson: I’ve done role-playing games of one kind or another since I was in college and did a little bit of D&D [Dungeons & Dragons] — the old-school, paper and pencil kind. The entire world of electronic gaming has come into existence in the decades since then. I’ve been able to watch how each new generation of game programmers takes ideas that originate with D&D-type games and incorporates them into more and more sophisticated electronic games. And when I became aware of the gold farming phenomenon some years ago, it attracted my interest, probably because I’ve written some other books in which real gold, real money, real currencies figure as an important plot element. I felt like this was on my turf.

Bookish: So the book takes us from Iowa to Seattle to China, to the Philippines, to England, to British Columbia. With each location, you provide this ridiculous level of detail and scope. It almost felt like it was like a videogame. Was that your intention?

NS: I guess it’s just part of my style or my habit to want to describe physical settings in enough detail that the reader feels like he or she is there and not just being fed a generic description. So I try to gather enough specifics about the way things look, the way they smell, how things work, so that the reader can feel immersed in the narrative. At the end of the day, that’s what readers, particularly readers of this kind of fiction, are really doing it for; they want to dive into the world of a book and feel like they’re there.

Bookish: A kind of escapism?

NS: Escapism is a term that some people wield as a criticism of certain books and certain readers. But a lot of people, particularly when they’re talking about fantasy or science fiction, they’ll say, “Oh, well this is just escapism”–it implies a kind of character flaw on the part of the readers. But it’s a service that this art form, the novel, can provide that you can’t get in as much depth and scope from other forms of art. And so vanishing into the imaginary world is a part of savoring and appreciating that art form.

Bookish: With “REAMDE,” I was reminded of your previous novel “Cryptonomicon,” especially with those random rants that you throw in: the best way to eat cereal; the mathematical functions of horniness; the emotional reclusion of bearded men. Got a quick rant for me right now?

NS: A lot of it tends to be disappointingly mundane stuff. Like my current pet peeve is–and here we’re definitely talking about First-World problems–over-hopping of craft beer. Hops are a very aromatic, bitter compound and I suspect that they’re being used by incompetent brewers to cover up defects in the taste of their produce. I’ve been trying this experiment lately: If you go into a microbrewery type of place and ask them for their “least-hopped” beer, they either can’t even answer the question or they seem pretty seriously taken aback. They’re just trying to kill you with hops.

Bookish: That should be a band name: Killing You With Hops.

NS: I have a list of band names. I’ve got it written down somewhere…here are a few: “Apex Predator,” “Apple Maggot Quarantine,” which is a phrase we often see in the Pacific Northwest.

Bookish: What are the current tech trends that really excite you?

NS: My answer might devolve into another rant. There’s all kinds of really hard medical evidence right now that chairs are incredibly dangerous. Like if you’re obliged to spend your workday, every single day, sitting in a chair, it’s actively bad for you. So I’m interested in anything that facilitates working while you are moving around. I allude to this in “REAMDE” where there’s the character who works all day on an elliptical trainer–I’ve got a treadmill that I walk on for a few hours a day while I write. It’s easy to envision a corporate park of the future where, instead of a big cubicle farm, there’s just a park and the employees are all kind of wandering around randomly in the great outdoors taking calls and doing exactly the same work but getting exercise in the process.

Bookish: What do you think is in store for publishing? And how does this tie into your [recently released] experimental fiction project, “The Mongoliad,” a community-driven, serial novel?

NS: People in publishing are constantly prophesying their own demise. And the fact is that most of the people who work in publishing are among the brightest, most hardworking, productive humans you could ever hope to know. And they’re extremely passionate about what they do and happy to be doing it. And essentially everything that these people do can be translated directly into an electronic publishing environment. It just takes some imagination and adjustment to figure out how the wires are going to be hooked up and who’s going to be signing the paychecks. The Subutai Corporation, the startup I’m part of that’s creating “The Mongoliad,” is one of many publishing platforms trying to find answers to those questions.

–By Rowena Yow

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“I don’t know what I want to do with my life” is the usual line you expect from recent grads or floundering 20-somethings. But increasingly, it’s a complaint among workers of every age. Studies suggest that the average American will have as many as seven careers in a lifetime, and that 60 percent of American workers regret their initial choice of career.

But a trend towards multiple job changes hasn’t made the process of switching career tracks any easier. Those looking to reshape the kind of work they do are faced with unique challenges: They have to learn new skills, stake out new professional networks, find ways to use unrelated professional experience to their advantage and handle potential drops in seniority and salary with grace. But, redirecting a career isn’t impossible and it can be hugely rewarding, so we’ve broken down the process into seven steps, each informed by books from career coaches and job placement experts that can guide your way.

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Step 1: Find your new work focus
Whether you have only a vague sense of what new line of work interests you, or you’re prepared to home in on a specific occupation, start your career-change journey by researching which industries and positions are best suited to your skills, experience and interests. “What Color is Your Parachute?”, the classic, annually updated guide by career expert Richard N. Bolles, offers readers advice, games and exercises to help narrow down the vast array of career paths to specific trades and industries that excite you. “A career choice,” Bolles writes, “is essentially the choice of what [artistic] medium you prefer, to express who you are.”

“The Pathfinder,” by Nicholas Lore, offers inspiring wisdom on doing what you love, but it also includes no-frills guidance for when the grueling process of choosing a new career has you feeling stuck. Lore, a career coach and social scientist, breaks down the top reasons why people get discouraged in their job search (he calls them the “Yeahbuts”) and offers frank advice on staying motivated, making crucial decisions and maintaining reasonable expectations.

If you’re really unsure what kind of work suits you best, you can try a personality test. In “Do What You Are,” career experts Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger help readers to choose careers based on the 16 Myers-Briggs personality types. If you’re an ENTP (Extrovert, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceptive), they suggest a job that’ll bring out your inherent entrepreneurial spirit, while ISTJs (Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Judging) tend to do best in low-key workplaces that value competence over speed.

Step 2: Plug in to its network
Once you have your sights set on a specific occupation—or even company—you’ll have to do some hobnobbing to make connections and get word of opportunities. And with as much as 80% of jobs going unadvertised, networking may be your best shot at finding an opening. “The Power Formula for LinkedIn,” written by Wayne Breitbarth on behalf of the leading professional networking site, shows you how to create a standout profile, gives a rundown of the site’s most valuable features and offers etiquette tips on connecting.

Of course, networking doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Even if you’re not a walking business card dispenser (or don’t want to be), there’s still hope. Career consultant Devora Zack’s “Networking for People Who Hate Networking” dismantles traditional ideas about networking—namely, that it’s an extrovert’s game—and identifies unique approaches to building and strengthening professional connections that more subdued types can deploy.

Step 3: Redesign your resume
All job seekers should make edits to their resume that are specific to any position they’re applying for, but career-changers should do a more thorough facelift. In “The Career Change Resume,” Kim Isaacs and Karen Hofferber, both resume advisers to Monster.com, show readers to how to highlight skills from former careers and market them as advantages which will serve them well in the different jobs they’re seeking.

Step 4: The job hunt
Don’t rely solely on your professional network to discover job opportunities. Orville Pierson’s “The Unwritten Rules of the Highly Effective Job Search” presents job-hunting tactics used by LHH, a leading global career services company, with tips on creating the ideal “target list” and staying abreast of your application’s progress to make sure it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. For tips on searching for jobs online and via social media, look to job career management expert Martin Yate’s “Knock ‘Em Dead 2013,” the latest installment of the highly successful series.

Step 5: Look and act the part
Once you’ve nabbed a meeting, you may find that the differences between your old and new job aren’t limited to the actual work you’ll do. Maybe you’re planning an escape from cookie-cutter cubicles to the open atmosphere of a startup. Or maybe you’re aiming to move from a homespun operation to a competitive, high-octane corporation. Different industries engender attitudes, vocabularies and looks all their own, and while it’s important to stay true to yourself, a new career often means fitting into the new professional culture. “Executive Presence,”  by consulting firm president Harrison Monarth, breaks down the mechanics of looking and communicating like a polished professional.

Step 6: Nail the interview
In addition to revamping their resume, career-changers will have to work harder than industry veterans during the interview process. In “Acing the Interview,” job placement and recruitment expert Tony Beshara shows how to convey your adaptability to new types of work and how to impart the relevance of prior experience.

Step 7: Mark your territory
Often career-changers find themselves in less than ideal ranks or salary ranges. In order to thrive and move up in your new workplace, you’ll have to go further than appearances. “The Etiquette Advantage in Business,” from the Emily Post foundation, offers authoritative guidelines on issues big and small, from choosing the wine at a client dinner to how to deal with workplace dishonesty. “The Hard Truth About Soft Skills,” by communication and leadership expert Peggy Klaus, looks at workplace challenges that lie beneath the surface but can make or break a career: How to manage workloads, deal with critical coworkers and cultivate a “personal brand” are among the issues Klaus explores. “Secrets to Winning at Office Politics,” by career coach Marie G. McIntyre, provides tips on honing your “influence skills,” managing problem bosses and laying out a dream career path that’s rooted in the realities of your new workplace.

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But when seemingly everyone (or at least every English lit major) has played fly on the wall at Bennett family dinners or the Netherfield Ball, what else of Austen’s early writing mind is there to discover? Many have looked to her lost novel, “The Watsons,” for insight into her formation as a storyteller. We look at this and other early works—often left unfinished or rejected by publishers—to see what they say about their authors.

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Jane Austen Makes It Personal
“The Watsons”
Austen began writing “The Watsons” in 1803, eight years before her breakout, “Sense and Sensibility,” but never finished it. It’s one of the author’s earliest goes at long fiction but, due to its truncated length—it falls off after five chapters—it was never given deep consideration, until editions began hitting shelves in the 1970s. It’s the story of Emma Watson, a privileged girl raised by a wealthy aunt, who goes to live with her less refined sisters and dying father. Austen’s own father was dying as she wrote book. She abandoned it after his death.

The autobiographical nature of “The Watsons” makes it unique among Austen’s works. While the character of the father’s decline closely parallels Austen’s own father’s trajectory, it’s left to wonder if any other characters—such as the rough-edged siblings—are based on Austen’s own kin, or if the story of an escape to greener pastures might have been an expression of her youthful frustrations.

“The Watsons” is also notable because of the various attempts made to complete it. Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback, finished where Austen left off and published it as “The Younger Sister” in the mid-1800s. Recently, Joan Aiken released a completed version, “The Watsons and Emma Watson,” in 1996.

José Saramago: A Nobel Laureate’s Rough Beginnings
“Claraboya”
When Portuguese novelist José Saramago sent out the manuscript of his first novel, “Claraboya,” in 1953, publishers didn’t even bother to send a rejection letter. Crushed by the snub, the 31-year-old Saramago diverted his efforts to journalism for the next 20 years, until he finally broke through as novelist in the early ’70s with “The World and the Other” and “The Traveller’s Baggage.” His career went into high gear from that point on, and in 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize following the publication of “Blindness.”

Later in Saramago’s career, the original publishers he’d sent the manuscript to offered to publish it, but Saramago refused. Now, two years after his death, with his wife Pilar del Rio at the helm of his estate, the long-discarded “Claraboya” is enjoying its much-deserved moment in the spotlight. Random House UK has released the novel in its original Spanish, with an English translation surely in the offing. The novel revolves around the residents of a crowded apartment block in Lisbon, and contains the graphic subject matter and political subversion that characterize his later works.

Hunter S. Thompson: A Barfly’s Baby Steps
“The Rum Diary”
Journalist and career inebriate Hunter S. Thompson wrote a short autobiographical novel, “The Rum Diary,” in the early 1960s, when he was 22. The story concerns a hard-drinking freelance journalist, Paul Kemp, who goes to San Juan, Puerto Rico to work for a tanking newspaper and spends his days doing everything—trashing motel rooms, raiding liquor cabinets, schmoozing socialites—but meeting his deadlines. Thompson himself worked for the San Juan Star in the 1950s, and, taking into account his subsequent literary output (the hallucinogenic “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and a significant body of LSD- and cocaine-fueled reportage), there’s little doubt about who the carousing Paul Kemp is based on.

After receiving multiple rejections, Thompson abandoned the novel and turned his attention to the political upheaval of the ’60s and ’70s. He dusted it off in 1998, he told Charlie Rose, because “it had a romantic notion.” The money didn’t hurt, either. “The Rum Diary” was recently adapted into a movie starring Jonny Depp.

Thompson’s very first novel, “Prince Jellyfish,” written a few years earlier, about his time as a copy boy at a small newspaper in the Hudson Valley, still awaits publication.

Arthur Conan Doyle Gets Preachy
“The Narrative of John Smith”
Before leaving an indelible mark on English literature, Arthur Conan Doyle ran a largely unsuccessful medical practice. During unprofitably quiet work hours, he wrote “The Narrative of John Smith,” a contemplative novel about a 50 year-old everyman bedridden with gout. The narrative, as it were, follows Smith’s musings on politics, philosophy and religion. Published for the first time in 2011, “John Smith” reveals Doyle’s acute social conscience, which remains present, but more subdued, in his later work.

Jules Verne’s Angsty Years
“Paris in the Twentieth Century”
Jules Verne is often credited as one of the founding fathers of science fiction, but unmoved publishers rejected one of his early efforts—the moody, semi-autobiographical “Paris in the Twentieth Century”— for seeming too unrealistic. Written in 1863, when Verne was 35, the novel imagines Paris in the year 1960. The main character, Michel, has just graduated with a degree in literature, but finds himself adrift in a society preoccupied exclusively with business and technology. This vision of a world with no regard for finer things didn’t sit well with Parisian editors.

Verne went on to write sci fi touchstones “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” and “Paris” gathered dust for the next 130 years until the author’s great-grandson discovered the manuscript in a safe in 1989. The book was published in 1994.

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