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I'm surrounded here at NPR Books by people with sophisticated, grown-up tastes — happy to dive into the latest Claire Messud or Daniel Alarcon or James Salter. Meanwhile, give me — any day — a book about teenagers (and preferably dragons). A good YA novel is a polished gem of solid storytelling, but more than that, it draws us back in time to the teenagers we once were — or never were, or wanted desperately to be. Here are five (well, really six) books that capture the roller coaster of adolescent experience: that delicate thump in the gut when you realize that suddenly a friendship is more than a friendship. Or the rock-solid conviction that YOU are the chosen one, the heroine of your own drama (whether or not you want to be). Or just that all-over twitchy feeling, lying on the living-room couch and staring out the window, of longing for your real life to begin.

If you've experienced sticker shock shopping for ground beef or steak recently, be prepared for an entire summer of high beef prices.

Multi-year droughts in states that produce most of the country's beef cattle have driven up costs to historic highs. Last year, ranchers culled deep into their herds – some even liquidated all their cattle – which pushed the U.S. cattle herd to its lowest point since the 1950s.

And dry conditions this summer could cause the herd to dwindle even further. That means beef prices may continue on a steady climb, just in time for grilling season.

At Edwards Meats in Wheat Ridge, Colo., near Denver, workers divvy up the bright red ground beef into trays, sliding one into a glass display case. A laminated price tag is the final touch. Recently, the number on that slip of paper has been getting higher.

"In the last three weeks, it has really jumped," says owner Darin Edwards. "Most of our prices have gone up at least a dollar a pound or more."

Price increases are commonplace when people start firing up their backyard grills, but Edwards says this year is different. Prices for certain cuts of beef have jumped to all-time highs.

"Sometimes you throw a couple big, thick T-Bone steaks up on the scale and it's 30, 40 bucks and [customers are] like, 'Yeah, I can't afford those,'" Edwards sayx.

And it's not just T-Bones. The same story goes for New York strips, tenderloins and ribeyes.

Even with the higher prices. Edwards is absorbing some of the cost. That's not something he can keep up for long.

"If it doesn't come back down in the next couple of weeks, we'll have to adjust our prices accordingly," he says. "We just kind of bite the bullet for a little bit."

So why are prices going up? Simply put, here just isn't enough feed. Because of the drought that has been battering much of Midwest cattle country for more than a year, there's a smaller supply of hay and dense grasses. Ranchers are having a tough time finding feed and when they do, it's more expensive.

During the winter, Gerald Schreiber, whose ranch is Last Chance, Colo., paid more than double what he usually does for hay. He usually maintains a herd of 250 cattle, but last year he prematurely sold more than 30 of his animals, unable to justify the high feed prices. With hindsight, he said he should've culled even deeper. A combination of drought, wildfire and wind transformed Schreiber's pastures into a blanket of invasive, noxious weeds. The fields haven't recovered.

"This is pretty unpredictable country," Schreiber says. "We deal with drought a lot. You got to get the rose-colored glasses off."

Recent research shows more than half of the country's beef cattle are in states where the pasture can't support large herds.

"A rancher has to make a decision," says Elaine Johnson, a market analyst with Cattlehedging.com. "Do I buy expensive hay and try to hang on for another year? Or do I just liquidate my cows? Tighter and tighter supplies means higher and higher prices."

Those higher prices mean more people could choose to forgo burgers and steaks this summer. Sales of beef have been down so far this year, while less-expensive options, like pork, are up. Johnson says consumers can expect to pay more for beef as long as dry conditions persist across the high plains.

"When you have a drought like this and have liquidated numbers significantly, it typically means that supplies are going to be reduced for two, three, four years, and it's one of the reasons why we've seen such a big increase in beef prices," Johnson says.

Most economists agree and expect prices to stay high the rest of the year. Until ranchers can build up their herds, the family barbecue will put a bigger dent in the pocketbook.

Luke Runyon reports from Colorado for KUNC and Harvest Public Media, a public radio reporting collaboration that focuses on agriculture and food production issues. A version of this post appeared earlier on the Harvest Public Media website.

Forms of gonorrhea that don't respond to the last line of antibiotics have rapidly spread in Great Britain, expanding the reach of drug-resistant disease.

The number of gonorrhea cases with decreased sensitivity to the front-line drug cefixime increased by nearly six times from 2004 to 2011 in England and Wales, a team from the U.K.'s Health Protection Agency reported Tuesday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a growing trend worldwide, with cases rising in Asia, North America and Europe. Japan has even documented a superresistant strain of gonorrhea that can thwart all available drugs.

Sixty years ago, doctors had a large arsenal against gonorrhea, including penicillin, ampicillin, tetracycline and doxycycline. But one by one, each of those antibiotics stopped working. Now there are only two drugs left: cefixime, which is taken orally, and ceftriaxone, which is injected into muscle.

Last summer, evidence emerged that cefixime had stopped working against gonorrhea in the U.S. The data were so worrisome that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sounded the alarm and issued new guidelines for treating the sexually transmitted disease. Then in January, Canada documented the first case of cefixime-resistant gonorrhea.

Gonorrhea, aka "the clap," is the second-most-common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S., with more than 300,000 cases reported in 2011.

In the current study, epidemiologists tested drug sensitivity for more than 7,000 gonorrhea cases in England and Wales. Strains that showed signs of resisting cefixime steadily increased from 2004 to 2010, when 17 percent of cases didn't respond to normal doses of the medication. This percentage then fell to 10.8 in 2011.

The gonorrhea cases that didn't respond well to cefixime also showed resistance to ceftriaxone.

These two drugs are in the same class of antibiotics. So many scientists worry that once the bacterium conquers one of them, it will eventually knock out the other, too.

The world doesn't have any backup treatments for gonorrhea. Once this class of antibiotics is gone, we've got a big problem.

I'm surrounded here at NPR Books by people with sophisticated, grown-up tastes — happy to dive into the latest Claire Messud or Daniel Alarcon or James Salter. Meanwhile, give me — any day — a book about teenagers (and preferably dragons). A good YA novel is a polished gem of solid storytelling, but more than that, it draws us back in time to the teenagers we once were — or never were, or wanted desperately to be. Here are five (well, really six) books that capture the roller coaster of adolescent experience: that delicate thump in the gut when you realize that suddenly a friendship is more than a friendship. Or the rock-solid conviction that YOU are the chosen one, the heroine of your own drama (whether or not you want to be). Or just that all-over twitchy feeling, lying on the living-room couch and staring out the window, of longing for your real life to begin.