It Could be Just Like the Front Table at the Independent Bookstore!!!

I am a Literature teacher at Cross Cultural Environmental Leadership (XCEL) Academy, a charter school in San Francisco. Our school has been teaching "at-risk" students in a successful learning environment for 3 years. Many of our students enter high school performing below state averages in math and reading, but in just a short time we have witnessed tremendous gains in these areas. I believe that it is important to teach students to know their hearts and use their minds well. We prepare them to live productive, socially useful, and personally satisfying lives with an academic program that stresses intellectual development and social involvement in our society. I have developed a strong curriculum that places great importance on learning how to learn, reason, question, and investigate. While in the bookstore looking for independent/silent/choice reading books for my students I realized that many of the books we teach are "traditional classics." We've had great success when teaching books like "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "The Bluest Eye" and "The Catcher in the Rye," to the whole class. However, I've noticed that when it comes to kids picking a book on their own, they are often intimidated by classics. I'd like to offer my students more choices when it come to independent reading and my classroom library doesn't exactly allow for it. I'd like to build a classroom library that offers students a chance to read books they would likely see on the front table of an independent bookstore! The "hot picks" I'd like to purchase include: "The Life of Pi" "The Kite Runner" "Wicked" "Siddhartha" "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" "Three Junes" "The Red Tent" "The Secret Life of Bees" "The Davinci Code" "The Poisonwood Bible" "Harry Potter #6" "The Namesake: A Novel" "Plainsong" I'm asking for 2 copies of each book so the students can have a reading partner and discuss the books using an "Accountable book talk" method. The journals, reading logs, and booktalks they keep will be used as a document in their language portfolio to show evidence of reading growth and progress. They will also be writing reading reflections where they write about their process. Thanks so much in advance for your support!