NOHS 2008 Summer Reading
“The man who does not read good
books has no advantage over the man
who cannot read them.”
-Mark Twain
NOHS Summer Reading Requirements
• Every student will participate in the
Summer Reading Program by reading one
book during the summer break.
• Choose from the 2008 NOHS Favorites,
independent choice, or AP Requirement
• Complete a dialectical journal
Dialectical Journaling
• A dialectical journal is a conversation
between you and what you are reading.
You simply write down passages that
make you think or interest you and write
about your thoughts.
Dialectical Journaling
• This process is an important way to
understand a piece of literature. By writing
about literature, you make your own
meaning of the work in order to truly
understand it. When you do this yourself,
then the text belongs to you--you have
made it yours..
Dialectical Journaling
• The passages are there for everyone to
read; however, the connections and
interpretations are uniquely yours. You are
neither right or wrong in your response.
So be willing to take risks and be honest.
Dialectical Journal Template
•
Sample Journal Entries
• “-they carried like freight trains;
they carried it on their backs and
shoulders-and for all the
ambiguities of Vietnam, all the
mysteries and unknowns, there
was at least the single abiding
certainty that they would never
be at a loss for things to carry”.

Page 2
• O’brien chooses to end the first section
of the novel with this sentence. He
provides excellent visual details of
what each solider in Vietnam would
carry for day-to-day fighting. He
makes you feel the physical weight of
what soldiers have to carry for simple
survival. When you combine the
emotional weight of loved ones at
home, the fear of death, and the
responsibility for the men you fight
with, with this physical weight, you
start to understand what soldiers in
Vietnam dealt with every day. This
quote sums up the confusion that the
men felt about the reasons they were
fighting the war, and how they clung
to the only certainty - things they had
to carry - in a confusing world where
normal rules were suspended.
Sample Journal Entries
•
•
•
•
“And the women came out of the
houses to stand beside their men—to
feel whether this time the men would
break. The women studied the men’s
faces secretly, for the corn could go,
as long as something else remained.”
Page 6“…
the sun was as red as ripe new blood.”
Page 6
bemused—“men lost their bemused
perplexity.” Page 6
“A huge red transport truck stood in
front of the little roadside
restaurant. The vertical exhaust pipe
muttered softly, and an almost invisible
haze of steel-blue smoke hovered over
its end. It was a new truck, shining
red, and in twelve-inch letters on its
side—OKLAHOMA CITY
TRANSPORT COMPANY.” Page 8
• ·
•
•
•
•
•
Grapes of Wrath
Steinbeck is pointing out the
family relationships here—women
standing beside their men as the men
decide what to do about the
situation.·
What is the “something else” that’s
referred to in the quote? Maybe
determination or pride?·
Interesting simile, especially for a
description of the sun.·
(adj.) preoccupied, stupefied ·
Why does Steinbeck give such
intricate details about this truck—
where it’s parked, its color, the
lettering? Perhaps it’s going to show a
contrast to the Dust Bowl imagery in
the first chapter.·
This is something new in a time when
many people couldn’t afford much that
was new.
NOHS
Summer Reading Selections
for 2008
The Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie.
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his
troubled school on the Spokane Indian
Reservation to attend an all-white farm
town school where the only other
Indian is the school mascot.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan.
In this wordless graphic novel, a man
leaves his homeland and sets off for a
new country, where he must build a new
life for himself and his family.
Before I Die
by Jenny Downham.
A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and
carries out a list of things to do before she
dies.
Buried
by Robin MacCready.
When her alcoholic mother goes missing,
seventeen-year-old Claudine begins to
spin out of control, despite her attempts
to impose order on every aspect of her
life.
Firestorm
by David Klass.
After learning that he has been sent
from the future for a special purpose,
eighteen-year-old Jack receives help
from an unusual dog and a shapeshifting female fighter
First Shot
by Walter Sorrells.
As David enters his senior year of high
school, a family secret emerges that
could solve the mystery of why his
mother was murdered two years ago.
General Winston’s Daughter
by
Sharon Shinn.
Seventeen-year-old heiress Averie
Winston travels with her guardian to
faraway Chiarrin, a country her father's
army has occupied, and once she arrives
and is reunited with her fiance, she
discovers that her notions about politics,
propriety, the military, and even her
intended have changed.
Gym Candy
by Carl Deuker.
Groomed by his father to be a star player,
football is the only thing that has ever
really mattered to Mick Johnson, who
works hard for a spot on the varsity team
his freshman year, then tries to hold onto
his edge by using steroids, despite the
consequences to his health and social life.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
by Ishmael Beah.
Ishmael Beah, now 25 years old, tells
how at the age of twelve, he fled
attacking rebels and wandered a land
rendered unrecognizable by violence. By
thirteen, he'd been picked up by the
government army, and Beah, at heart a
gentle boy, found that he was capable of
truly terrible acts.
Red Glass
by Laura Resau.
Sixteen-year-old Sophie has been frail
and delicate since her premature birth,
but discovers her true strength during a
journey through Mexico, where the sixyear-old orphan her family hopes to
adopt was born, and to Guatemala,
where her would-be boyfriend hopes to
find his mother and plans to remain.
Slam
by Nick Hornby.
At the age of fifteen, Sam Jones'
girlfriend gets pregnant and Sam's life
of skateboarding and daydreaming
about Tony Hawk changes drastically.
Story of a Girl
by Sara Zarr.
In the three years since her father
caught her in the back seat of a car
with an older boy, sixteen-year-old
Deanna's life at home and school has
been a nightmare, but while dreaming
of escaping with her brother and his
family, she discovers the power of
forgiveness.
Thirteen Reasons Why
by Jay Asher
When high school student Clay Jenkins
receives a box in the mail containing
thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his
classmate Hannah, who committed
suicide, he spends a bewildering and
heartbreaking night crisscrossing their
town, listening to Hannah's voice
recounting the events leading up to her
death.
Trigger
by Susan Vaught.
Teenager Jersey Hatch must work
through his extensive brain damage to
figure out why he decided to shoot
himself.
Twisted
Laurie Halse Anderson.
After finally getting noticed by
someone other than school bullies and
his ever-angry father, seventeen-yearold Tyler enjoys his tough new
reputation and the attentions of a
popular girl, but when life starts to go
bad again, he must choose between
transforming himself or giving in to his
destructive thoughts .
A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Publishers Weekly Review: /* Starred Review *
Afghan-American novelist Hosseini follows up his bestselling
The Kite Runner with another searing epic of Afghanistan in
turmoil. The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil
war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women.
Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy
businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old
Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce
a child. Eighteen later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old
Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after
her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or
starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam
And Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed.
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows and Scorpion Bomb
by Adrienne Mayer
Review from Amazon.com
Greek Fire is an extraordinary book. To put the subject
of the book plainly, it deals with biological and
chemical warfare in the ancient world from myth to
history. I had not given much thought to the use of
chemical and biological agents in the ancient world,
focusing instead on the more familiar weaponry and
tactics. The majority of historians and certainly the
people we know probably believe that chemical
weapons were created in World War I, with the advent
of mustard and other gasses. This is very far from the
truth and Adrienne Mayor provides us with the missing
link in the ancient world: the use of dangerous agents
to cause mass destruction.
Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer
Review from Amazon.com
Reeling from the brain-altering effects of oxygen
depletion, Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt.
Everest in the early afternoon of May 10, 1996. He
hadn't slept in fifty-seven hours. As he turned to begin
the perilous descent from 29,028 feet (roughly the
cruising altitude of an Airbus jetliner), twenty other
climbers were still pushing doggedly to the top,
unaware that the sky had begun to roil with clouds....
"This is the terrifying story of what really happened
that fateful day at the top of the world, during what
would be the deadliest season in the history of
Everest. This powerful, cautionary tale of an
adventure gone horribly wrong is a must-read.
Life of Pi
by Yan Martel
Pi Patel, a young man from India, tells how he was shipwrecked
and stranded in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for 227 days. This
outlandish story is only the core of a deceptively complex threepart novel about, ultimately, memory as a narrative and about
how we choose truths. Pi, regardless of what actually happened
to him, earns our trust as a narrator and a character, and makes
good, in his way, on the promise in the last sentence of part
one--that is, just before the tiger saga--“This story has a happy
ending.” If Martel’s strange, touching novel seems a fable
without quite a moral, or a parable without quite a metaphor, it
still succeeds on its own terms. Oh, the promise in the
entertaining “Author’s Note” that this is a “story that will make
you believe in God” is perhaps excessive, but there is much in it
that verifies Martel’s talent and humanist vision. (Reviewed May 15,
2002) -- Will Hickman
Smashed
by Koren Zailckas
Review from Amazon.com
Karen Zailckas recalls her years of binge drinking
in college and the effects it had on her
relationship and mental state. “Smashed blows
to smithereens the myth that alcohol is the ‘safe
drug’ in young people’s lives. Koren Zailckas puts
a personal face on the leading drug problem
among our youth, and shows the side of teen
drinking that won’t appear in a beer ad.” –David
Jernigan, Ph.D., research director, Center on
Alcohol Marketing and Youth, Georgetown
University.
Stuck in Neutral
By Terry Truman
Review by Booklist Review
Shawn McDaniel thinks his father is considering killing him. Of course, no
one knows that Shawn is able to think at all because the 14-year-old, who has
cerebral palsy, can't speak, interact, or control his movements and bodily
functions. But Shawn is also a genius; he remembers everything that he hears and
is even able to read. And one more thing--the seizures, which his family members
find so pitiable, release his soul in a way that allows him to move about the
universe and feel and see things that would be impossible to experience in his
trapped body. Shawn would like to live, but he understands that his father, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, who won the award for a poem about Shawn, wants
him dead for the most unselfish reasons.
This short novel packs a punch that transcends its length. Readers spend
the whole book inside Shawn's head, a place that is so vivid, so unique they will
be hard pressed to forget its mix of heaven and hell. Nor will they easily stop
thinking about all the big issues Shawn raises--not just about life and death, but
also about the meaning of freedom, and about the responsibility that comes with
love. One wonders how Truman could write something so close to the bone--until
the author's note reveals that he is the father of a son like Shawn. An intense
reading experience. ((Reviewed July 2000)) -- Ilene Cooper
The Education of a Coach
by David Halberstam
Review from Amazon.com
Joan Vennochi, a political writer who rarely writes about sports
said this of Bill Belichick. "Belichick, she noted, wasn't 'glib or
glitzy'. At press conferences he sometime seems a little goofy
and is often way too grim. But he is a leader without the
swagger, selfishness, and pomposity that so many men in
business, politics, and sports embrace as an entitlement of their
gender and posture." This is not just a book about a man, or
just about a coach, or just about a game, or just about football.
This is a book about a man, who is a coach, who happens to
love football, and the manner in which this man leads his life.
David Halberstam, who has written his twentieth book, the last
fourteen of which have been best sellers; and the last six, based
on sports, has written the coach's coach book in "The Education
of a Coach". He has been able to dig deep inside of this man,
Bill Belichick. The man who has come to be known as the best
Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
Review from Amazon.com
This is a high-adventure novel. A German scientist puts
together an expedition to follow successfully in the tracks of a
previous, attempt to reach the center of the Earth. In Verne's
time, it was not known that the Earth had a molten core, and
the nature of the core, while believed by many to be molten,
was debated. The expedition encounters many unexpected
creatures, land-forms, plants, and obstacles. The pace of the
writing is very fast, in general, with a few digressions to
explain scientific debates. The science in the novel is actually
superior to the science of the film, as the dinosaurs of the
book are more believable than those of the film. Definitely a
fun read!
Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
Review from Amazon.com
John Krakauer's novel "Into the Wild" is both a chronicle of
the life and time's of American college grad turned Luddite
drifter Chris McCandless, and a reflection on people whose
somewhat anti-society type views lead them to embrace
exploring the outer limits of Nature's dangerous boundaries.
Krakauer chronicles the adventure of Chris McCandless, a
college graduate who for years has his eyes set on a goal of
both personal and spiritual definition as well as outcasting
himself from the very society he often loathes. Although the
text on the front of this book already spells Chris's fate, the
harrowing, chancy and sometimes exhilarating journey that
took him there is not lost on this reader. As the saying goes,
life is a journey not a destination, and for Chris it is the
friendships he accrues as well as the things he learns within
himself that make his story so memorable.
Fidget's
by Jennifer French
What's it like to live in a young body and mind while struggling with
ADD/ADHD? And how does it feel to have to live with a loved one
suffering with this disorder? FIDGETS is an eye-opening novel written
especially for teens. Mildred Patterson owns THE OLD HAS-BEEN
ANTIQUE SHOP in Evergreen Colorado. Her daughter, Betsy, "keeps
hoping a two-ton leech will swallow up her immature, older brother and
regurgitate him back up, whole and well." Eventually, and after much
heartache, the Patterson family unravels the mystery, finds the culprit
(ADD/ADHD) and finally makes an arrest . "a rest" well-deserved by
everyone involved. After many years of total chaos, fear, frustration and
little hope, this family finally finds an effective treatment; an alternative to
Ritalin and other invasive-type drugs. There have been hundreds of nonfiction books written about ADD/ADHD and many are written with 'hohum' dry facts. FIDGETS, on the other hand, is a novel that captivates,
informs and inspires readers with plenty of action, humor and clear
lessons for coping with this little-understood affliction. This entertaining
story concludes with a 'new sign of the times' being posted at the store:
THE AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE