The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

What are you waiting for? Summer is slipping through your fingers! And it's the perfect time to read these books. In fact, little JT is listening to The Hobbit before naptime and bedtime - she even says Bilbo! When I first read the books, in fifth or sixth grade, I skipped over all the descriptive passages. But Tolkien wasn't a professor of language for nothing - this stuff is seriously beautiful - read it out loud if you don't believe me. And even the umpteenth time I re-read Tolkien, I have hard time putting it down. I KNOW what's going to happen next (and you may, or may think you do, from the movies) but that isn't the point. Look for the humor - Gandalf (and everyone else, but Gandalf is funniest) is always making fun of those hobbits. * Already a fan? Re-read it! Already did this summer? Try James A. Owen's Here, There Be Dragons, which includes a lot of Tolkien references. I didn't find it as clever as Owen thinks it is, but it was fun. * I wish I could list all the authors in Tolkien's class, but I think he stands alone. For another beautifully written, read between the old-fashioned language for the humor, magic-infused, action doesn't pick up until at least a hundred fifty-pages but you're still interested all the way along, epic book, try Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Interworld, Neil Gaiman and Michael Reeves

In the regular world, Joey Harker has no sense of direction. Turns out, all his direction sense lies in between the worlds. Joey is a walker, someone who can cross between the alternate universes that are created every time a vastly important decision is made. All kinds of Joey Harkers (different genders and species) share this gift, and with it the burden of maintaining the balance between the forces of magic and the forces of science that strive to take over all the worlds. * I've been waiting for a Neil Gaiman sci-fi or fantasy book that would be fully appropriate for middle schoolers. (We have his Coraline at Hillview and it is one of the creepiest horror books I've read! Most of his stuff is a little, um, not appropriate for our library. But check it out someday - I think he may be my current favorite author...) Here he's teamed up with Michael Reeves, who does TV, computer games and a lot of Star Wars novels. Put Gaiman's awesome imagination together with Reeves's masterful plotting, and you get a wildly inventive and compulsively readable novel. I'm hoping for a sequel!

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

When her brother dies on the train while their mother takes them to live with a foster family, Liesel steals a book from the ground at his funeral. Her foster father uses this unlikely title (The Gravedigger's Handbook) to calm her when she wakes from nightmares about her brother, and to teach her to read. This extraordinary story is narrated by Death, who is takes time out of his grueling job (it is the 1930s in Germany...) to keep tabs on Liesel. You can mostly trust the hype on this one - I'm very picky, and occasionally saw the effort Zusak was making in crafting his elegant prose. But usually I was moved, and often to tears... The effect lasted for days... Zusak wrote this one for adults but it's marketed in the US for teens. IMDB says there's a movie coming out...