Navigating the Blog

The blog has four indices to assist in finding entries that interest you. They are organized by author, title, genre, and material. You can follow the tabs at the top of the page to find each index to see if there is an entry that interests you.  

Final Reflection 

In writing this blog, I have gained a newfound respect for YA media. For a long time, I had looked down on YA books as being simple and less interesting than adult books, with a few stand-out books here and there. Now that I’ve read more YA books than I probably have in my life, I understand just how vast, varied, and wonderful YA can be. Unfortunately, because of this blog, my TBR pile has also doubled in size. 

What amazed me most about curating this collection is the sheer amount of queer representation that exists in YA now. Not only are there gay characters, but I’ve read books with gender diversity, including nonbinary, bigender, and transgender protagonists. There is even the book Iron Widow, which involves a love triangle that resolves through polyamory! While I may have found a lot of queer representation because I was looking for it, I was amazed that it was there at all. I can only remember a handful of queer books from when I was a teenager, and most of them centered around white gay male characters. The books I found for this collection were not only diverse in terms of gender and sexuality, though, they were also racially diverse queer books. I understand that the publishing industry has a long way to go before what is being published is actually representative of the population, but this is still a huge and beautiful win for all the teens looking to see themselves in the media they consume. 

This blog also provided me with a new respect for graphic novels as a medium. I’ve read good graphic novels in the past, and I knew that manga was not only very popular but that it has some of the best writing in the world. I still, however, never gravitated towards it, and I definitely did not realize just how many graphic novels there were! Now, I find myself looking at those sections in bookstores and libraries, understanding the power and depth that they can have. 

Overall, creating this blog was a difficult, stressful, and amazingly rewarding process. As someone who loves reading but is a slow reader, I’ve found myself preferring to scroll on my phone rather than read a book lately, as it’s faster and easier to find moments of joy. I took this class because I wanted to have an external motivational force to get myself to read and read a lot again. And I did, and I was reminded that the satisfaction and mental stimulation from reading a whole book or watching a whole television series or watching a whole movie is greater than anything my phone could provide. I hope to continue my current momentum and keep up with reading more and more in my future career. I want to be able to give recommendations to teens who are struggling to read or desperate to see themselves in stories. I would also like to keep up this blog or something similar to it to help me remember all the media that I consume. It’s been a joy to learn about the creators of these stories and conceptualize library programs based on different materials. I’m grateful to have had this experience, and hope I can keep the lessons I’ve learned from it close to my heart.