Playlists For Young Adult Novels

We are knee deep in "Read To The Rhythm" our music and rhythm themed Summer Reading Club theme. And though here in California the school year begins in the middle of summer, I'm going to ride the summer wave all the way into September, when it remains hot as hell with only the distant cool breezes of Halloween at night to remind us that we do indeed have an autumn around here.

This year's Summer Reading Club theme is the jackpot for this Mama (that's me in the third person, as I'm due with the second kid any moment now).  It combines my love of discovering new tunes with my love of young adult literature.

And I discovered my favorite way to combine my love of both is to create (and beg my teen patrons to join me in creating) music playlists inspired by young adult novels! You can take your playlists in any direction you like.

I chose to create Ipod inspired playlists like these. But you could use simple clip art of boomboxes or paste a list with the book image onto a CD painted black (to resemble an old school lp) or print song/artist titles onto music notes, cut them out and paste them onto the books themselves.

Point is, you've got options.







What's the appeal for our contingent of Reluctant YA Librarians, you ask? On the face of it, this requires way too much initiate and effort. True. BUT. Apparently I'm not alone in my love for book-inspired playlists because there are a bevy of Young Adult Authors who have created and posted their own playlists comprised of songs that inspired them while they were writing their novels.

Samples of author-created playlists 

AUTHOR-CREATED PLAYLISTS

Book Riot's (always a great, underappreciated resource) February, 2015 list of some pretty hot authors and links to their playlists.

Francesca Lia Block created a soundtrack for her groundbreaking Weetzie Bat.

Kirstin Conn-Mills created a playlist for her music-themed book "Beautiful Music For Ugly Children" on playlist.net, a site that's all about creating personal playlists.

Over at "The Unofficial Addiction Book Fan Club" (I'm still trying to digest the name of the site) they have the motherlode of author-created playlists.

And over at epicreads.com they have kindly culled all the music references from Michelle Falkoff's 2015 novel "Playlist For The Dead".