Looking for stories of innovation, creativity, and small-town ingenuity? Explore our Recommended Reading for Spark! booklists, featuring titles for preschoolers to adults that celebrate inventors, makers, rural life, and bold ideas that changed the world. Find your next great read and spark your imagination by visiting our online catalog to place a hold today!

Preschool

• My First Heroes: Scientists 
• Stone Soup by Marcia Brown 
• The Walking School Bus by Aaron Friedland 
• These Bees Count by Alison Formento 
• Be A Maker by Katey Howes 
• Izzy Gizmo by Pip Jones 
• Your Farm by Jon Klassen 
• All Aboard! Elijah McCoy’s Steam Engine by Monica Kulling 
• We Move the World by Kari Lavelle 
• City Summer, Country Summer by Kiese Laymon 
• Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran 
• Flying Free: How Bessie Coleman’s Dreams Took Flight by Karyn Parsons 
• Not a Box by Antoinette Portis 
• The Most Magnificent Maker’s A to Z by Ashley Spires 
• The Horseback Librarians by Jane Yolen

Children

• The Secret Garden of George Washington Carver by Gene Barretta 
• Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions by Chris Barton 
• Jabari Tries by Gaia Cornwall 
•  Library On Wheels: Mary Lemist Titcomb and America’s First Bookmobile by Sharlee Glenn 
• Calling All Minds by Temple Grandin 
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer 
• Rainbow Weaver/Tejedora del Arcoiris by Linda Elovitz Marshall 
• Stitchin’ and Pullin’: A Gee’s Bend Quilt by Patricia C. McKissack
• The Wright Brothers: Aviation Pioneers and Inventors by Wendie C. Old
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson 
• Pedro’s Yo-Yos: How a Filipino Immigrant Came to America and Changed the World of Toys by Robert Peñas 
• Kate, Who Tamed the Wind by Elizabeth Garton Scanlon
• African American Women Scientists and Inventors by Otha Richard Sullivan
• Girls Think of Everything by Catherine Thimmesh
• What Do You Do with an Idea? By Kobi Yamada 

Teens

• Changing the Equation: 50+ Black Women in STEM by Tonya Bolden 
• King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callendar
• Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America edited by Nora Shalaway Carpenter
• Design Thinking: A Guide to Innovation by Fred Estes 
• Teen Innovators: Nine Young People Engineering a Better World with Creative Inventions by Fred Estes
• Eureka! 50 Scientists Who Shaped Human History by John Grant 
• Rocket Boys/October Sky by Homer H. Hickam 
• Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story by Sarah Myer
• HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance by Denali Sai Nalamalapu 
• Air by Monica Roe 
• Quilts of Gee’s Bend by Susan Goldman Rubin 
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults by Robin Wall-Kimmerer 
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai 

Adults

• Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown 
• The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Aerial Age by Tom D. Crouch and Peter L. Jakab 
• The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan 
• The Whole Town’s Talking by Fannie Flagg 
• Black Inventors: Crafting Over 200 Years of Success by Keith C. Holmes 
• Fermentation Journeys by Sandor Katz 
• Love for the Land: Lessons from Farmers Who Persist in Place by Brooks Lamb 
• The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride 
• Farming While Black by Leah Penniman 
• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly 
• The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Businesses, Economies, Societies, and Nations by James Surowiecki
• Love Thy Neighbor: A Muslim Doctor’s Struggle for Home in Rural America by Ayaz Virji 
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer
• Witnesses of Wallville: Documenting a Rural Southern Maryland Community by The Wallville Project Team 
• The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson