ALA/YALSA Best Books for Young Adults Books

Best Books for Young Adults was the annual list of the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association. Under that name the committee worked from 1966 through 2010, selecting and annotating each year a list of significant adult and young adult books — fiction and nonfiction both — along with a Top Ten drawn from the full list. YALSA's board restructured it at the 2010 Midwinter Meeting, and after the 2010 edition it became Best Fiction for Young Adults, which continues today and, as the name indicates, covers fiction only.

Because it closed in 2010, the list now works as a backlist tool rather than a current-year guide. It is a four-decade record of what young adult librarians rated highly through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and it regularly pointed teenagers toward adult titles and nonfiction that the fiction-only successor no longer considers. For anything published from 2011 forward, Best Fiction for Young Adults is where the same work continues.

Information from YALSA.