I didn’t touch YA books unless I had too with a ten foot pole (We had these points we had to earn for reading books and taking tests and so I’m sure I read some). I couldn’t stand them. Books like Andersonville and Dune series were my playground in middle school and High School.
I felt the same way. When I was in high school, I read only one YA novel, Don Robertson's The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread (Fawcett, 1967), and it was a pretty good read. My favorite authors included Martin Caidin and Robert Leckie, who wrote non-fiction books on military topics.
Among I also read on my own at the age of 16 were General Claire L. Chennault's autobiography Way of a Fighter (G. P. Putnam's, 1949), Hector C. Bywater's fictional The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), and Up Ship! by Charles E. Rosendahl (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), a book about airships, copies of which are now worth beaucoup bucks.