My daughter talked me into reading "The Giver", a Newbery winner; it's written at about an eighth grade level, but it describes a fairly inventive dystopian world. Very entertaining!
I suspect that a lot of the public schools in NJ assign this, as every semester I have to deny 3 or 4 students' proposals to write papers on it.
About a month ago, in a used bookstore in DC, I found a copy of Robert A. Heinlein's 1980 novel
The Number of The Beast, which I read and liked when I was 11. It is the worst piece of shit I have ever read. I got about 150 pages in, thinking I could find whatever I liked about it as a kid (probably just parallel universes and descriptions of boobs), and eventually got so outraged that I tore the goddamn thing in half.
Life, Inc actually turned out to be pretty great, if bleak. While on vacation in The Outer Banks, I bought an anthology of ghost stories called
Spooky South. You Southerners are awesomely insane! Or at least you used to be! Now I'm reading Syd Field's
Four Screenplays, which is actually a lot better than his more famous book.