RISING 12th GRADE SUMMER READING LISTS

Expectations of  Summer Reading

• Make brief annotations throughout your book: highlight and label important character descriptions and events, comment on interesting descriptions and your reactions, keep track of possible themes and other patterns you notice. 
• Your marginalia should include some writing, labeling, defining, response, and reaction – annotation is more than simply highlighting.  Jot down keys events and write a brief summary of each chapter at the start/end of the chapter – a few bullet point notes is sufficient. 
• While annotation is not expected on every page, and it should not be a tedious process, you need to actively engage with the book and write down notes to help you remember your reading when school begins.  Aim for a couple of annotations every 3-4 pages and at the end of each chapter.
• Note that some extra credit options may be listed, and you will have to complete extra tasks in addition to reading the listed book.

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Justice and Goodness through a Global Lens

Heritage

***Required: Choose one of the following works: ***
***You may read a second book for extra credit***

Half of a Yellow Sun
​Chimamanda Adichie 

With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war.

Purple Hibiscus
​Chimamanda Adichie ​

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche tells the evocative story of 15-year old Kambili’s life growing up in Nigeria during a military coup.

The limits of fifteen-year-old Kambili's world are defined by the high walls of her family estate and the dictates of her repressive father. Her life is regulated by schedules: prayer, sleep, study, and more prayer. When Nigeria begins to fall apart during a military coup, Kambili's father is involved mysteriously in the political crisis, while Kambili and her brother are sent away to live with their aunt. In this house, full of energy and laughter, Kambili discovers life and love - and a terrible, bruising secret deep within her family.

Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
Bart D. Ehrman

The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups Christians claimed that there was not one God but two, or twelve, or thirty. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine; others that he was divine but not human. Eherman offers an enlightening study of these early forms of Christinaity, and how they came to be suppressed, reformed, or forgotten.

HomeGoing
​Yaa Gyasi 

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. 
 
Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.​

Aristotle’s Way: Ten Ways Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life
Introducing the Ancient Greeks
Edith Hall

​In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons we come to understand more about our own characters and how to make good decisions. We learn how to do well in an interview, how to choose a partner and life-long friends, and how to face death or bereavement.

Life deals the same challenges – in Ancient Greece or the modern world. Aristotle’s way is not to apply rules – it’s about engaging with the texture of existence, and striding purposefully towards a life well lived. This is advice that won’t go out of fashion.

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
Edith Hamilton

Monsters, mortals, gods, and warriors: For over sixty years readers have chosen this book above all others to discover the thrilling, enchanting, and fascinating world of Western mythology. From Odysseus's adventure-filled journey to the Norse god Odin's effort to postpone the final day of doom, Edith Hamilton's classic collection not only retells these stories with brilliant clarity but shows us how the ancients saw their own place in the world and how their themes echo in our consciousness today. An essential part of every home library, Mythology is the definitive volume for anyone who wants to know the key dramas, the primary characters, the triumphs, failures, fears, and hopes first narrated thousands of years ago-and still spellbinding to this day. 
 

Pachinko
Min Jin Lee

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity

Introducing the Ancient Greeks
​Edith Hall

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. Yet this accomplished people never formed a single unified social or political identity. In Introducing the Ancient Greeks, acclaimed classics scholar Edith Hall offers a bold synthesis of the full 2,000 years of Hellenic history to show how the ancient Greeks were the right people, at the right time, to take up the baton of human progress. Hall portrays a uniquely rebellious, inquisitive, individualistic people whose ideas and creations continue to enthrall thinkers centuries after the Greek world was conquered by Rome. These are the Greeks as you’ve never seen them before.

The Poisonwood Bible ​
Barbara Kingsolver

This story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil.






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The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison 

It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove -- a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others -- who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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There, There
Tommy Orange

As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss.

1984
George Orwell

Portrays life in a future time when a totalitarian government watches over all citizens and directs all activities.

n 1984, London is a grim city in the totalitarian state of Oceania where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston Smith is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.

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The Common Good
Robert B. Reich

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed. But first we need to weigh the moral obligations of citizenship and carefully consider how we relate to honor, shame, patriotism, truth, and the meaning of leadership.
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Where the Desert Meets the Sea
Werner Sonne (trans. Steve Anderson

An illuminating and heart-stirring historical novel set in post-WWII Palestine, where the boundaries of love and friendship are challenged by the intractable conflicts of war.

The Overstory ​
Richard Powers 

An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers-each summoned in different ways by trees-are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest. In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of-and paean to-the natural world. 

The Underground Railroad 
​Colson Whitehead​

After Cora, a slave in pre-Civil War Georgia, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South.

AP English Literature 
***All Read:***

Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
***Translated by Oliver Ready (Penguin Classics)***

Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished man who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker seemingly for her money, thereby solving his financial problems and at the same time, ridding the world of an evil parasite. Raskolnikov also strives to be an extraordinary being, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose.
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The Awakening 
Kate Chopin

Edna Pontellier is on holiday with her husband and children at Grand Isle, on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. There, she is pursued by and falls in love with the passionate and earnest, Robert Lebrun. But Robert, convinced that their relationship is doomed, flees to Mexico. On her return to New Orleans, Edna, overwhelmed by her desire for freedom, moves out of the family home to her own rented property. Robert eventually returns to declare his love for Edna only to abandon her again with tragic consequences.
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*** Extra Credit Books***
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Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes
​Edith Hamilton 

How to Read Literature Like a Professor
​Thomas C. Foster  

Anything on the below reading list for AP Literature (Novels/ Plays): 
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***Novels***

Americanah
​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Purple Hibiscus
​​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ​

Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood 

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Persuasion
Jane Austen

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Kindred
Octavia Butler

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood

Emma
Jane Austen 

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

All the Light We
Cannot See
Anthony Doerr

A Tale of Two Cities
​Charles Dickens

Mansfield Park
Jane Austen

Another Country
James Baldwin

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte

The Stranger 
Albert Camus (Mathew Ward trans.)

Great Expectations
​Charles Dickens

Bleak House
​Charles Dickens

Invisible Man 
Ralph Ellison

Where Angels Fear to Tread
​E.M. Forester 

The Magus
John Fowles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy

Middlemarch
​George Eliot 

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

A Passage to India
E.M. Forester 

Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi

The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy

The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot

Howard's End
E.M. Forester 

The French Lieutenant's Wife
John Fowles

Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving

A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce

The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver

Moby-Dick
​Herman Melville

Cry, the Beloved Country ​Alan Paton

Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
​Mark Twain 

The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt

The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton

Native Son;
​Black Boy
Richard Wright

Portrait of a Lady
Henry James

Dubliners
James Joyce

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Billy Budd
​Herman Melville

Wide Sargasso Sea
​Jean Rhys

Sophie's Choice
William Styron

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut

The Custom of the Country
​Edith Wharton

Washington Square
Henry James

The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka

Saturday
​Ian McEwan

Wise Blood
​Flannery O'Connor

Midnight's Children
 Salman Rushdie

Anna Karenina
 Leo Tolstoy

Grapes of Wrath 
John Steinbeck

Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut

The House of Mirth 
​Edith Wharton

Mrs. Dalloway;
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Wolf 

 ***Plays***

Albee, Edward                  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Beckett, Samuel               Waiting for Godot
Chekhov, Anton                The Seagull; The Cherry Orchard
Fugard, Athol                    Master Harold and the boys
Ibsen, Henrik                     A Doll House; Hedda Gabler;
                                          An Enemy of the People 
Miller, Arthur                     Death of a Salesman
O’Neill, Eugene                Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Shakespeare, Wm.           King Lear; Much Ado About Nothing;
                                          AsYou Like It; Twelfth Night (plays)
Stoppard, Tom                  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead;
                                          Arcadia (plays)
Wilder, Thornton               Our Town
Williams, Tennessee        The Glass Menagerie;
                                         A Streetcar Named Desire (plays)
Wilson, August                 The Piano Lesson 
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