Run by Daisy Whitney at daisywhitney.com

You know those summer reading lists they give you at the end of the school year? Kafka and Orwell and so on? Well, throw it out. Because here’s the real summer must-read list for teens!

• Best Kissing: Perfect You by Elizabeth Scott
• Best Summer Lovin’: Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler
• Best Page Turner: Cracked up to Be by Courtney Summers
• Best YA with Grace & Beauty of The Lovely Bones: If I Stay by Gayle Forman
• Best Overall Romance: Along For the Ride by Sarah Dessen
• Best Romantic Comedy: Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson
• Best Everything Changes YA: One Lonely Degree by C.K. Kelly Martin
• Best Escape: The Season by Sara MacLean
• Best Fantastically Tragic Protagonist: The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp
• Best Life Lesson: North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
• Best “Boy” Book The Girls Will Like Too: Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
• Best Post-Apocalyptic Thriller That Will Make You Think the Noises Your Cats Make in the Night Come from Zombies: The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Best Better-Than-Twilight Book: Evermore by Alyson Noel

Now go to the library, the book store, your best friend and read!!!

The list was compiled this list with the help of four writing friends: Trish Doller, Suzanne Young, Courtney Summers and Mandy Morgan. And no, Courtney didn’t pick her own book for the list. I picked it! The list includes books published in 2008 and 2009.

When you’re a writer, there are so very many humbling experiences it’s impossible to recount them all. There is one experience though that is both humbling and inspiring and that is reading a breathtaking story, the kind of story that plants itself in your heart, mind, soul and body. Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay” is such a story. The book opens when 17-year-old cello prodigy Mia goes out for a drive with her parents on a February day in Oregon. A horrible car crash takes the lives of her parents and sends Mia into a coma. The story unfolds as Mia watches herself in the hospital while her friends and grandparents and other family members visit and wait and hope. We get to know all of them — her parents, her friends, her little brother, her amazing boyfriend, his bandmates — through Mia’s flashbacks as she makes the toughest choice of all. Should she go and join her parents in the next life, if there even is one, or fight to stay here on earth, living with unspeakable loss, but living, nonetheless?

The book reminds me of another amazing novel, “The Lovely Bones” in that it tackles big issues like life, love, loss and, frankly, why we’re here. “If I Stay” has its own answers and I hope you all will read it.

As for me, I said the book is humbling and inspiring. It is humbling because it shows me what greatness in literature is, and for that same reason it’s inspiring. Which means, it’s time to write…