I’ve always considered myself the kind of person who knows how to appreciate beauty, and my very favorite kind of beauty is the kind that you’ll find between the pages of a good book.

I, like most any English major, can appreciate the classics, have an ingrained adoration for the mind of William Shakespeare and am able to pull layers of enjoyment from the work of Whitman. However, the kind of literature that is at the very top of my list, that I will pick up for a fourth time long before I would browse the biographical essays of my local bookstore, is Young Adult literature.

In academic circles, I feel as if YA lit gets a bad rap. It’s shoveled aside and considered to be “books about teenage vampires and the stuff kids don’t actually understand.” But as someone who spends every day with teenagers, with kids, I can tell you that they possess some incredible thoughts; they have amazing minds. And more than that, they have an entire genre of literature dedicated to opening up those minds and flooding their brains with pretty, fantastical, horrific, shocking language.

Young Adult literature holds an incredibly special place in my soul. It has the ability to connect with the human experience, to make you sit back and feel something in a way that I have yet to find in another genre. The literature that is created to resonate with young people can also resonate with those who aren’t young at all, or maybe those who are young at heart.

YA lit holds between its pages the experiences that you’ve faced, that saved you, that broke you, that struck your young life and defined your adult one. These are the experiences represented in Young Adult novels. These themes and the variations of the language connect to young people, to students, in a way that perhaps the classics and archaic poetry is unable to. It’s a reflection of their lives. This genre makes students sit back and appreciate reading, appreciate stories and understand that their lives and the lives of storybook characters really aren’t so different.

I want to leave you with a final plea, a bucket list of sorts. The following is a list of my very favorite Young Adult novels, novels that have challenged me, changed me, given me the opportunity to appreciate the beauty of words. Read one; read three; read every single novel on the list. Explore the elements of your life, or the life you wished for, or the life you can’t have via these beautiful collections of pages.

#1. “We Were Liars” by E. Lockhart (2014)
“Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you.”

#2. “Eleanor and Park” by Rainbow Rowell (2012)
“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

#3. “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” by Ransom Riggs (2011)
“Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far?
If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.”

#4. “Looking for Alaska” by John Green (2005)
“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

#5. “The Magicians” by Lev Grossman (2009)
“He wasn’t in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren’t their fault.”