sex and drugs booklists

Submitted by caleb (L-net staff) on Tue, 2010-02-16 10:55

The other day I had a chat with a teen patron and ending up recommending a book, The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. Knowing about this book that covered a subject that the patron was very interested in - sex and drugs - helped turn around an "inappropriate" question into a fun and successful chat.

Afterwards I asked Sara Ryan, the teen services librarian at Multnomah County Library if there was such thing as a Sex and Drugs booklist. After all, I've got to have more than one ace up my sleeve the next time this comes up.

Multnomah County Library has a set of booklists for teens and a teen section of their website. We also considered if lists of banned books or lists from watchdog groups like Parents Against Bad Books in Schools might help.

These are all good places to start, and I do think it helps if you can say you have read the books you recommend (how impossible is that?), but what do you do with a patron who is expressing an explicit interest in a topic such as sex and drugs?

We brainstormed and came up with these books and lists of books. Sara gets most of the credit. Like all of it:

Sex

YALSA's '08 Popular Paperbacks list "Sex is..."
Multnomah County Library's If you Like Zane... is also called "African-American Erotic Fiction" - I'm not sure where the general list of erotic fiction is, though you can always use the subject heading.

Drugs

The Guardian UK has a recent article on books with fictional drugs
Biographies of famous musicians are bound to intersect with drugs, but also to cover much broader topics.

More

San Francisco Public Library's "Gang-Related: Nonfiction" and "Gang-Related: Fiction" lists
Multnomah County Library's Urban Fiction and Beyond booklist
Little Willow (prominent YA blogger)'s master list of "Tough Issues for Teens" books (first created in '06 and updated consistently ever since)

These lists will never be complete - please brainstorm away.

Sarah Ludwig on the YALSA blog recently expressed the idea that libraries shouldn't try too hard to be cool. Instead, we should show that we are passionate about something. Anything. Books? That sounds like a good place to start.