Last week, I (Jackie) had the pleasure of going to a seminar titled Connecting Boys with Books, presented by a multi-talented (librarian, author, speaker, storyteller) man by the name of Mike Sullivan. There, we heard some things we probably already knew (books like different books than girls), and quite a bit that we didn't. For instance…

• DYK that boys' reading level average is 1.5 years behind that of girls?
• And that a sophmore study showed that boys in the US read an average of only 2.3 hours per week, while spending 6.5 hours on average in front of a screen EACH DAY?

In addition to giving us suggestions for getting boys involved in library programming and telling us how we might make those programs more interesting to boys, Mr. Sullivan was kind enough to provide us with a list of 120 Books for Boys (you can find a list of more than 400 "guy books" on his website). I won't take the time to list all 120 of them for you, but here is a small sample:

Picture Book:
Dog Breath: The Horrible Trouble with Hally Tosis (Dav Pilkey)

 Non-fiction titles:
It's Disgusting and We Ate It! (James Solheim)
Oh Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty (Joy Masoff)
Into Thin Air (Jon Krakauer)
The Worst Case Survival Handbook (Joshua Piven & David Borgenicht)

 Action/Adventure:
Alex Rider (series) - Anthony Horowitz
The Young Man and the Sea - Rodman Philbrick
Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of WWII - Joseph Bruchac
Night of the Howling Dogs - Graham Salisbury

 Funny Titles:
Boy 2 Girl (Terence Blacker)
Loser (Jerry Spinelli)
Hoot (Carl Hiaasen)
No More Dead Dogs (Gordon Korman)

 Sports Titles:
Heat (Mike Lupica)
Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery (John Feinstein)

 Gothic/Horror:
Cirque Du Freak (series) - Darren Shan

 Fantasy series:
The Secrets of Droon (Tony Abbott)
Tales of the Otori (Lian Hearn)

 Sci-Fi:
Maximum Ride series (James Patterson)
Airborn (Kenneth Oppel)
First Light (Rebecca Stead)