Looking for recs for a sixteen year old...

[carnivorousgiraffe]

Hello! My brother is basically extreme-grounded for the next five months or so and he's asked me for recommendations on books he could read while he's stuck at home. I have a list growing in my head but I'd like him to have some stuff beyond what I like/usually read. For example, I don't read a lot of nonspeculative fiction.

He's a huge James Patterson fan, loved Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and I believe he likes dystopias in general. I would also like to take this chance to sneak in some classics and poison his mind with wacky ideas like feminism, LGBT(+) are people too, or social justice, etc., but subtly, so any recs like that would be nice.
He's sixteen, seventeen in March, and the parents aren't too strict on his reading except when it comes to graphic sexual material (they probably wouldn't be pleased with too much implied sexual material but I think I could sneak that in if the story's good).

Right now I'm thinking:
Tamora Pierce
Terry Pratchett
John Green
Dragonriders of Pern (though it's been a while so I can't remember if there was some vaguely problematic material? I know there were sex scenes in some, but I read them at his age so it should squeak by).
Fahrenheit 451
Animorphs
The Giver and subsequent sequels.

I had others, but I'd have to be home looking at my bookcase to remember them.

Thanks in advance for any recs!

ETA: (either recced or I thought of them after I posted)
ETA2: Holy crap you guys this is amazing! I'm putting up here everything I'm definitely recommending to him because I've read it before, heard of it before, or it sounds perfect but I'll be checking with everything I don't recognize later. Thanks so much!
Scott Westerfield
Neil Gaiman
1984
Maureen Johnson
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Lord of the Rings
Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin
Hitchhiker's Guid to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Book Theif by Markus Zusak
So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Patricia C. Wrede
Artemis Fowl
Dianna Wynne Jones
City of Ember series

Comments

[melannen]

What reading level is he at? For a sixteen-year-old boy reading at age level, I would actually stay away from most YA and throw adult novels at him. On the other hand you named mostly YA as stuff he's already read, so maybe he does read below grade level, or just doesn't read much at all? (All the same I'd probably throw him right in with adult SF: most boys I know who started really reading at that age did it because they fell in love with an adult SF series and powered through, not because they were eased in to it.)

...not that there's anything wrong with YA! But I'd say that, say, Animorphs and Patricia Wrede and Tamora Pierce and Artemis Fowl might be too young for him?

Here's some recent adult SF writers that unregenerate het-male-type people I know really love but are also approved of by feminist/lgbt types I know:

John Scalzi
Jim C. Hines
A. Lee Martinez
David Weber (particularly the Honor Harrington books)
S. M. Stirling (particularly the Nantucket series and the Emberverse)
World War Z
Lois McMaster Bujold
Terry Pratchett (who has some longer YA if you want to start him on easier stuff)
Cory Doctorow (ditto with having some YA)
Neil Gaiman (ditto)
Lev Grossman (who wrote The Magicians, often described as 'Harry Potter all grown up')
Jim Butcher

I would actually, um, avoid McCaffrey - I love her stuff too, but it's chock-full of really problematic gender and sex elements, of the kind that sixteen-year-olds can internalize without noticing (which is why so many of us loved it at sixteen, and yet.)

Older stuff that fits the same categories:
Lord of the Rings - he will either bounce right off of this or fall completely in love with it and demand all the books of Lost Tales, one or the other.
Ursula K. LeGuin - who has some great classic dystopias, among other things
Roger Zelazny
Douglas Adams

(I could list more but they get into categories of either 'might not be the best place for an SF beginner to start' (Like Octavia Butler or Samuel Delany) or 'might be too problematic or full of sex' (like Robert Heinlein.))

Also, is he/was he at any time interested in Star Wars or Star Trek? Because they both have some really good, not too difficult to read tie-in novels (and even the not-so-good ones are workmanlike) and if you can get him started on those he will probably never run out. Also many of them are written by people who write/wrote their own good original SF, so they're a good way for a beginner to start finding authors they like without just picking at random.

[carnivorousgiraffe]

Yeah, I couldn't think of stuff much beyond YA, mostly because that's what I know he's liked so far in terms of stuff I've recced him. He wasn't much of a reader until the last year or so, so I'm figuring some of this stuff is to fill in the basics he missed when he was younger. Actually, I don't think he would have moved beyond James Patterson and related or at least not for awhile if I hadn't told him I'd pay him twenty bucks for each Harry Potter book he read but didn't want to--a twenty bucks well spent. ♥ Plus he read and enjoyed the first few Harry Potter books without feeling talked down to, so I thought some of the stuff that's held up for me at least might still be good for a first time.

Also, Animorphs is partially on the list because it's the longest series I could think of and he's gonna have a lot of time on his hands.

I also honestly am a voracious YA reader myself, which is partially why I needed the recs for some variety in the levels. Most of what I've read recently that was written for adults are classics.

I have Pratchett and Gaiman already (Pratchett is my favorite author period, I will throw him at any one looks for recs regardless of their usual interests) and Ursula K. LeGuin is a popular one so she's definitely going on the list. I completely forgot about Douglas Adams I don't how that happened! On the list~

I was having second thoughts about McCaffrey as I was typing her name in the post actually...it's been so long that I don't even remember stuff that bothered me at the time (except the weird gender dynamics in the book where they colonized the planet that stuck out to me even as a preteen), just things that other people brought up. So yeah, probably something to rec much later on...

Thanks for the fantastic list! I've read a lot of these but sometimes I go through times where I cram in so many books at a time I come out of it remembering that I liked them and not much else... XD

As far as I know he doesn't watch a lot of speculative fiction TV, weirdly. Mostly sitcoms I think. I hope to someday get him into Trek at the very least so I will keep the tie-ins in mind for the future, thanks!

[melannen]

I was never a huge fan of Animporhs but while it's a long series I remember individual books as being pretty short (although maybe they got longer later? I'm way, way behind on those) so that I could zoom through half a dozen in the time it'd take for one full-length novel. So I rec'ed several up there with very long series (Honor Harrington, Emberverse, and the Dresden Files are all over a dozen now, and most of the others have a bunch of books out.)

And yeah, I still read a lot of YA too! But I feel like there is a period when you should be reading lots of adult SF, and then you can grow up some more and go back to YA and know what you're seeing for the first time? Dunno. And it doesn't necessarily talk down to you, but it depends on your brother - a lot of times teenagers are kind of sensitive about the percieved age thing. :P

McCaffrey - yeah. She has gender issues, and there's also the issue where one can read through all her books and count the fully consensual sex scenes on one hand, and even in the cases where it's mostly consensual it's usually a man who has a huge amount of power over the woman's life, and the narrative never notices that this is problematic. So not really a great guide for teenagers.