School Library Journal has announced their choices for Best Books 2024, 193 titles were selected. Ten sections were chosen: Picture Books, Transitional Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Nonfiction Elementary, Nonfiction Middle to High School, Poetry, Graphic Novels, Manga, and Top 10 Audiobooks.
You can download a spreadsheet PDF of the entire list, category by category. Every year different lists include titles I have recommended and titles I didn’t encounter anywhere – on blogs, through perusing the library, or in the batches of books publishers have sent to the Library Commission.
The titles I have read includes Medusa by Katherine Marsh. It is the first book in the Myth of Monsters series. Ava, 12, is sent to an institute for descendants of Greek monsters after an incident at her regular school ended with a boy being frozen. But she isn’t sure Medusa was a monster, and she and some new friends go on an unauthorized trip to find Medusa and ask her some questions. This book is for upper elementary school readers.
Ten Little Rabbits by Maurice Sendak is on their Picture Book list. It is copyrighted in 1970, but was never published until 2024. The text is mostly numerals from 1 to 10 and then back to 1. The boy is a showman, but the rabbits get rather hard to handle when there is a group of them. The rabbits, in colors of white, blue, gray, or yellow, keep popping out of the hat. You don’t see them disappear, they don’t go back into the hat, but on each page there is one less – and they are becoming more manageable. Listeners will enjoy the magic show.
I hope you find some good titles to add to your collection from the lists on the School Library Journal web page.
