NPR Summer Reads Funny Books List is Live

As I mentioned back in June here, when NPR announced their Summer Reads would have the theme of Funny Books:

"And this year is awesome because it is all about Funny Books. Funny Books is something we get asked for at the library all of the time, but since it is not a genre categorization, it is often hard for us to find titles. We usually rely on working together within our libraries and across libraries making and sharing lists."

And now that the list is done, categorized, and annotated, I can tell you it is even better than I imagined. Click here for the crowd sourced lists of books, stories, poems, fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels....everything regardless of its genre of format category that the readers and an expert panel put together.

Bookmark this page. Even in happier times, I was asked for "funny" book frequently, but these days, with the world being a dumpster fire, this is a request we all get daily.

Not only is it hard to gauge what another human thinks of as "funny," humor being so subjective, but also there are all the appeal issues that you have to consider too. What kind of story in general does this person enjoy or want at this time. Once we figure that out, then we have to hunt and peck within that larger result for those books that could be "funny." It can be done, but it is time consuming.

But now we have a wide and diverse lists of options to get us started, and there is one for just about every reading taste.

The NPR Summer Reads program is great in general, every year. It is a resource I use all year long, and one I use as a backlist resource.

And it is more than the final list they compile, by the way. Every year the panel of experts contribute articles too. Click here for all of the Summer Reads Funny Books bonus coverage, but in particular here is a great article about one of my backlist favorites for the entire family, The Westing Game, a title I would never have classified as a "funny" book, but the article made me realize the snark is one of the reasons I love it [and lots of teens do too].

To encourage you to use the wealth of resources compiled by NPR Summer Reads over the years, click here to run a keyword search on the NPR to pull up every Summer Reads they have ever done; from horror to thrillers, romance to comics and more, it is all there to help readers with one click.