By title

By author

Sam Potts

• Lou Gehrig, Boy of the Sandlots
• Guernsey Van Riper Jr.

• I think this is the first book I ever picked out on my own and read by myself. I’m pretty sure it is. I can tell you this for sure: Lou Gehrig always has been and always will be my favorite baseball player. And I’m from Boston, so that’s saying something about the influence of this book.

• What Do People Do All Day?
• Richard Scarry

• Before there was the Internet, there was What Do People Do All Day? to describe the whole world and everything in it. Still hours of fun to explore every page.

• Stuart Little
• E.B. White

• He wears a sweater and sails a boat and drives a car and gets dumped on a garbage barge. Oh, and he’s a mouse.

• Paddle To The Sea
• Holling C. Holling

• An adventure story starring a carved wooden boat that travels all the way across Canda. A carved wooden boat? you say. That’s right: a carved wooden boat! I wished I could be that boat.

• The Great Brain, Great Brain Series
• John D. Fitzgerald

• This book and the other Great Brain books that followed are a handy how-to guide in the arts of scheming, swindling, cheating, and being a younger brother.

• Tintin Adventures (Series)
• Herge

• We just called them “Tintins.” I’d say, “Do you have any new Tintins?” and my friend Jamie would say, “I just finished The Black Island. You can borrow it but you have to give it back.” YOu always had to give them ack because these books are precious.

• Dubliners
• James Joyce

• Yeah it’s James Joyce, but so what? He ain’t so tough. The beauty of these stories is in their simplicity. You’ll be able to taste the peas with vinegar and pepper in “Two Gallants.” Read this when your friends are reading Catcher in the Rye. (And read that one, too.)

• Ficciones
• Jorge Luis Borges

• A character named Borges comes across an encyclopedia of a fictional land. Pierre Menard rewrites bits of Don Quixote verbatim, by coincidence. Funes remembers everything that happened, ever. Amazing. Worth re-reading about every five years or so.

• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Essays and Arguments
• David Foster Wallace

• If you get far enough to read about the toilets in the title essay, you’ll probably go on to read every word Wallace ever wrote. This book also contains the most terrifying description of baton-twirling you could ever read.

• Anatomy of a Typeface
• Anthony Lawson

• For the serious typographer as well as the font enthusiast: histories of all the classic typefaces from the days when fonts weighed about 50 pounds (because they were made out of lead). Simply indispensable.

Patrick Jones

• Coyote Steals the Blanket, A Ute Tale

• A trickster tale about a coyote, a blanket, and a rock. Hot times in the desert.

• Dangerous Girls

• Or anything by Stine. The man's a genius. Don't believe me: this is about twin teen girls vampires one hot summer. Do the math.

• Hidden Talents

• This has it all: humor, adventure, smart mouth teen boys, stupid rules to rebel against, and fire.

• Scholastic Book Of Lists

• When you don’t have time for chapters or even paragraphs, choose bullets. Bullet points that is.

• Scary Stories 3

• Nothing wrong with the first two volumes, but this is "just delicious!" Don't read this during lunch or before or after.

• Strong to the Hoop

• A 10-year-old gets a chance to play with the big boys. Read this and you'll feel the sweat fly off the pages.

• The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, The Definitive History of the Most Important Artists and Their Music

• By the Rolling Stone editors. An earlier edition of this book was my Bible at age 17. Everything you need to know.

Mike Grosso

• My Near-Death Adventures, (99% True!)
• Alison DeCamp

• Stan is the Man. This is one of few books that had me laughing out loud. The writing by itself makes for a fantastic story, but the defaced photographs throughout the book make this something much more special.

• The 8th Continent
• Matt London

• Dude, it's a book series about two kids that take the world's garbage and turn it into an eighth continent. What's not to like? A great book for scientific-minded environmentalists.

• Hoodoo
• Ronald L. Smith

• Take the eeriness of THE LAST APPRENTICE and put it in recession era rural Alabama. Ronald Smith is a master of setting and mood, and not an author to be read in the dark unless you're very brave.

• One Handed Catch
• Mary Jane Auch

• My students get grossed out sometimes when I book talk this one, so I assure them the first chapter is well-handled to insure minimal vomiting. Plus, it's a book that gets kids thinking about what it means to be differently-abled.

• My Seventh-Grade Life In Tights
• Brooks Benjamin

• A lot of boys don't want to dance. That will change after reading Brooks Benjamin's awesome book.

Alison DeCamp

• Across the Nightingale Floor, Tales of the Otori, Book 1
• Lian Hearn

• Kind of a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fantasy set in an alternate Japan where people can have superpowers. It's really well-done fantasy.

• Knucklehead
• Jon Scieszka

• A fantastic graphic novel about Jon's boyhood in Flint, Michigan, where my husband is also from. It's funny and real and mostly funny.

• Out from Boneville, Boneville Series, #1
• Jeff Smith

• These are so imaginative, innocent, and creative. I am a big fan of smart graphic novels and how they make us think.

• The Eddie Dickens Trilogy
• Philip Ardagh

• There's a stuffed stoat in these books. I'm not even sure what that is, but do I really need to say more?

• The Willoughbys
• Lois Lowry

• Same Lois Lowry as THE GIVER, but a completely different kind of story, one where the kids are super smart and the adults need to get a clue.

• Winger
• Andrew Smith

• My 16 y.o. has read and reread this book about a 14 y.o. rugby player. It's a story about all the confusion that's part and parcel of growing up while simultaneously injecting humor and love and redemption into the entire mix.

• Nicholas
• Jean-Jacques Sempe

• Nicholas is irreverent and slightly naughty and a bit clueless but always funny.

• How They Croaked, The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous
• Georgia Bragg

• (by Georgia Bragg & Kevin O'Malley)

  Just like the title says, this is a book about how famous people died. But really it's a history book.

• We Were Liars
• E.Lockhart

• I read this book in three hours. Granted, I told my family I wasn't feeling well so they actually left me alone for that amount of time, but I devoured this book. There's an unreliable narrator and a shocking ending and a slew of open-ended questions that we still argue about in our house.

Patrick Jones

• Becoming the Natural, My Life In and Out of the Cage

• There are many UFC biographies out, so it's who you like. I'm an old guy; I like the old guy.

• Headlock

• A novel about a teen breaking into wrestling while wrestling with some problems of his own. The author is a Ric Flair fan (whooo!).

• Lion’s Tale, Around the World in Spandex

• There's a lot of wrestling biographies out there, but Y2J's is probably best of the newer ones probably because he takes himself the least serious of all the squared circle scribes.

• Mondo Lucha A Go-Go, The Bizarre and Honorable World of Wild Mexican Wrestling

• Filled with photos of these masked Mexican wrestlers, this is a must to understand the history and scope of pro wrestling.

• Octagon

• Nothing but photos of UFC fighters through all stages of their careers. From the founders like Ken Shamrock to the modern kings of eight-sided cage, a wonderful way to browse the history of UFC.

• Title Shot, Into the Shark Tank of Mixed Martial Arts

• The book follows the author's journey to become a MMA fighter. He thought training for the Army was hard work. Welcome to the cage.

• Warrior Angel

• The 4th novel of a series that started in the 1960s still punches hard with hard punches and harder choices.

• Whole Sky Full of Stars

• A quick little read about a young man trying to earn money, and respect, by winning a boxing tournament.

• Why I Fight, A Novel

• The gritty covers lets you know the story inside is a tough one about a young man searching for himself, one fight at a time.

• WWE Encyclopedia

• You get photos, lists, more photos, and more lists. As JR would say, "Business is about to pick up."