AP English Summer Reading Assignment

							AP English Summer Reading Assignment 2011
     Glastonbury High School’s Senior AP English course will prepare students for the AP
Literature and Composition exam. Students may also choose to enroll with the
University of Connecticut to earn college credit for the course through the Early College
Experience program. Speak to your guidance counselor at the beginning of fall semester
if you are interested in the UConn credit.
    Those students who elect to take AP should be prepared to read challenging texts, to
analyze texts in depth, and to write, and write, and write some more. Over the summer
all students are required to read the same novel, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
as preparation for the course. This novel will be handed out to students at the end of the
year meeting. In addition students will also read four short stories which will be
provided at the A.P. meeting. They include: “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner,
“My Oedipus Complex” by Frank O’Connor, “The Year of Silence” by Kevin
Brockmeier, and “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri. Extra copies will be left at
the front desk in the office should students need them over the summer. These are the
required assignments.
    As an A.P. student it is expected that reading matters to you. We offer suggestions for
further reading appropriate to the course because we realize that summer invites
reading—in hammocks, on beaches, late at night when it’s too hot to sleep, at breakfast
because you can’t wait to find out how it ends…
Fiction (Novel or Short Story):
            Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues
            Isabel Allende, House of the Spirits
            Margaret Atwood—The Handmaid’s Tale
            Jane Austen—Pride and Prejudice, Emma, or Sense and Sensibility
            Saul Bellow—Henderson, the Rain King
            Bronte—Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre
            A.S. Byatt--Possession
            Raymond Carver—any short story collection
            Kate Chopin—The Awakening
            Michael Cunningham-- The Hours
            Anita Desai—Clear Light of Day, Diamond Dust Stories
            Charles Dickens—Bleak House
            Ralph Ellison—Invisible Man
            William Faulkner-- The Bear, Absalom, Absalom, Sound and the Fury
            Jonathan Safron Foer—Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
            Kaye Gibbons—Charms for the Easy Life, A Cure for Dreams, Ellen Foster
            Joseph Heller—Catch 22
            Herman Hesse—Siddhartha
            Khaled Hosseini—Kite Runner
            Kazuo Ishiguro—Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go
            John Irving—Prayer for Owen Meany
            James Joyce—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
            Jhumpa Lahiri—The Namesake, Interpreter of Maladies
            D.H. Lawrence—Sons and Lovers
        Cormac McCarthy—All the Pretty Horses
        Ian McEwan—Atonement
        Bernard Malamud—The Natural, The Assistant, or short stories
        Toni Morrison—Song of Solomon, Sula
        Yoko Ogawa—The Housekeeper and the Professor
        Flannery O’Connor—Everything that Rises Must Converge
        Mark Twain—Huckleberry Finn, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
        Ann Tyler—If Morning Ever Comes, Searching for Caleb
        Virginia Woolf—Mrs. Dalloway
        Richard Wright—Black Boy
Memoir: Frederick Douglass—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
        George Orwell—Down and Out in Paris and London
        Annie Dillard—An American Life
        Tobias Wolff—This Boy’s Life
        Maxine Hong Kingston—Woman Warrior
        Beryl Markham—West with the Night
        Barack Obama—Dreams from My Father
        Ulysses S. Grant—The Autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant
                          Civil War        (Over)
Biographers and History Writers
          David McCullough—The Great Bridge (story of the Brooklyn Bridge)
                               Mornings on Horseback (biography of Teddy Roosevelt)
                               Or any of his other biographies
          Bill Bryson—History of the World
          William Manchester—The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill
          Stephen Ambrose—Undaunted Courage
                              Band of Brothers
         Carolyn Alexander—The Endurance
         Richard Rhodes—The Making of the Atomic Bomb
                            Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb
         Tom Wolfe—The Right Stuff
         Tobias Wolff—In Pharaoh’s Army
         James M. McPherson—Battle Cry of Freedom
         Laura Hillenbrand—Seabiscuit, An American Legend
         David Grann—The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
Social Commentary
         Barbara Ehrenrich—Nickled and Dimed, on Not Getting By in America
         Studs Terkel—Working
         Martin Luther King Jr.—Dream: The Words and Inspiration of Martin Luther King Jr.
         Malcolm Gladwell—The Tipping Point
                              Blink
         Thomas Friedman—The World is Flat
         Stephen Leavitt and Stephen J. Dabner—Freakonomics
Science and Nature Writers
       Michael Pollan—The Omnivore’s Dilemma
                        In Defense of Food
       Charles Darwin—The Voyage of the Beagle
       Barbara Kingsolver—Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
       Rachel Carson—Silent Spring or The Sea Around Us
       Annie Dillard—Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
       Henry David Thoreau—Walden
       John McPhee—The John McPhee Reader
       John Muir—Nature Writings
       Peter Matthiessen—The Snow Leopard
       Lewis Thomas—Lives of a Cell
       Temple Grandin—Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals
   If there is another book you would like to read, first have the title approved by either
Mr. Dursin or Mrs. Lloyd.

Because you have elected to sign up for the AP course, we expect that you are a dedicated
reader who will, of course, read many more titles over the summer simply for the sheer
pleasure of the experience. However, this is the base requirement.