Dan Gutman

• The Invention of Hugo Cabret

• Genius. The Sgt. Pepper of children's books.

• Hatchet

• Still the best survival story.

• Ball Four

• This is the book that turned me on to reading. For the first time, somebody wrote like they were having a conversation with me.

• Yertle the Turtle

• Or anything by Dr. Seuss. Can’t beat it.

• Mad Magazine

• Without it, all intelligent life on Earth would have ceased to exist.

Gordon Korman

• The most action, the best gadgets. Move over 007.
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
• I've heard all the haters: "Too silly, too British." I don't care. This stuff rocks.
• Feed
• This book reminds me of how it felt to be a teenager discovering really cool science fiction.
• Into Thin Air

• My favorite Everest book; my favorite adventure book.

• The Great Brain, Great Brain Series
• This was the series that taught me to love middle-grade fiction. A tween swindler back in the days when a silver dollar was serious coin.
• One Knee Equals Two Feet
• The lesser-known of Madden's awesome football books. I read it first, and still love it best.

Michael Buckley

• The Outsiders

• A timeless story of outcasts versus the privileged. Exciting and heartbreaking — Hinton should be applauded for understanding the mind of a guy so well.

• All Star Superman Books 1 and 2

• Lex Luthor finally finds a way to kill Superman and the Big Blue Boy Scout prepares for his death with a shocking ending no one could have seen.

• Lord of the Flies

• A ship full of children from an all boys' school crashes on the beach of a deserted island. Unfortunately, it isn't long before the kids stop working together and break up into tribes with dark and deadly results.

• Pinocchio

• Most people have seen the movie but few have read the book and that’s a shame. Pinocchio is a walking nightmare and hilarious.

• The Graveyard Book

• An adaptation of the Jungle Book but instead of a boy being raised by wolves, he's reared by ghosts in an abandoned cemetery. It's chilling and dark, yet a powerful lesson on how a boy becomes a man.

Bruce Hale

• Percy Jackson and The Olympians

• Exciting, funny, and occasionally gross. What more could you want?

• The Hunger Games, The Hunger Games, Book 1

• Intense stuff — reality TV taken to the extreme — but I couldn't put it down.

• The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-Time Indian

• Funny, touching, and fascinating — plus it has excellent cartoons.

• Out from Boneville, Boneville Series, #1

• Love the drawings, love the characters, love the stories.

• Whales On Stilts

• Straight-out wacky, hilarious stuff.

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
• 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.