Multicultural Reading List
English II PreAP
Choose a book from this list or one of comparable quality approved by your teacher.
One purpose of this list is to help you prepare you for the rigors of AP courses and
college reading. Another purpose is to expand your knowledge of the world around you!
Bold: appeared
on the AP
Literature exam
FICTION
Africa
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Power of One, Brice Courtenay
Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
A Bend in the River & A House for Mr. Biswas,
V.S. Naipaul
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Isara: A Voyage Around Essay, Wole Soyinka
Asia
China
The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
& Ina Rilke
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
Japan
47 Ronin and Other Stories, John Allyn
Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden
Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, & Wind-Up
Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
India
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
Sister of my Heart, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
A Passage to India, EM Forster
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Nectar in a Sieve, Kamala Markandaya
Confessions of a Thug, Phillip Meadows
A Fine Balance & Such a Long Journey, Rohinto
Mistry
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Middle East
The Smile of a Lamb, David Grossman
The Kite Runner & A Thousand Splendid Suns,
Khaled Hosseini
Cities of Salt, Abdelrahman Munif
Dancing Arabs, Sayed Kashua & Miriam Shlesinger
Europe
France
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Three Muskateers, Alexandre Dumas
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Les Miserables & The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
Victor Hugo
Germinal, Emile Zola
Germany
The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
Metamorphosis & The Trial, Franz Kafka
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque
Ireland
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man∫ &
Dubliners, James Joyce
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Italy
Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
Foucault’s Pendulum, Umberto Eco
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
Russia
The Winter Queen, Boris Akunin
The Master and the Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Pale Fire & Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Dr. Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
The Gulag Archipelago & One Day in the Life of
Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
Notes from the Underground & The Brothers
Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Spain: Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes
Turkey: Snow, Orhan Pamuk
Scandinavia
Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson
The Ice Palace, Tarjei Vesaas
IMPORTANT NOTE: In the spring, you will participate in
literature circles where you choose one of 5 books. You
may want to save these titles for the Spring Semester:
Cry the Beloved Country, Thing Fall Apart, Kaffir Boy,
Purple Hibiscus, and A Long Way Gone.
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Multicultural Reading List
English II PreAP
Latin America & the Caribbean
The Alchemist & Veronica Decides to Die, Paul Coelho In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
War of the Saints, Jorge Amado
The Lost Steps, Alejo Carpenter
Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
House of the Scorpion, Nancy Farmer
The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Eva Luna, Daughter of Fortune, & House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
One Hundred Years of Solitude & Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff
The Funeral Party, Ludmila Ulitskaya
Typical American, Gish Jen
Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee
Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall
Globe-Trotting
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
Monkey Bridge, Lan Cao
A Free Life: A Novel, Ha Jin
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Bonesetter’s Daughter & Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
NONFICTION
Africa
A Long Way Gone, Ismael Beah
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, Judy
Bernstein
Out of Africa, Isaak Dinesen
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra
Fuller
Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane
Ake: The Years of CHildhood, Wole Soyinka
In the Shadow of the Sacred Grove, Carol Spindel
The Harmless People, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Asia
The Stories of Tibet: Conversations, Thomas Laird
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Jung
Chang (fictionalized family history)
Tibet, Tibet, Jung Chang
The PIllow Book, Sei Shonagon
Ghandi: An Autobiography, Mohandas Ghandi
Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural
Revolution, Ji-li Jiang
Europe
Madame Curie: A Biography, Eve Curie
Latin America & the Caribbean
My Brother, Jamaica Kincaid
Paula, Isabel Allende
Middle East
A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz
Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid, Jimmy Carter
Love and War in Afghanistan, Alex Klaits and
Gulchin Gulmamadova-Klaits
Gift of Valor: A War Story, Michael Phillips
The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad
Places in Between, Rory Stewart
Generation Kill, Evan Wright
Globe-Trotting
The Lost Boys of Sudan, Mark Mixler
Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazario
Sound-Shadows of the New World, Ved Mehta
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir, Frank McCourt
What is the What? Dave Eggers (fictionalized memoir) When I Was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago
All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, Maya Angelou
Really Old Stuff: Epic Poems, Classics, Myths & Legends
The Ramayana, RK Narayan
The Iliad, Homer
The Aeneid, Virgil
El Cid
The Song of Roland
The Thousand and One Nights
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Beowulf
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Multicultural Reading List
English II PreAP
Multicultural North America
FICTION
Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya
Love Medicine & Tracks, Louise Erdrich
Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia
Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
Obason, Joy Kogawa
A Gesture Life, Chang-Rae Lee
House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday
Bone: A Novel, Fae M. Ng
No-No Boy, John Okada
When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Mordecai Richler
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
Pocho, Jose Antonio Villarreal
Through the Ivory Gate, Rita Dove
The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara
Another Country & Go Tell it On the Mountain, James Baldwin
Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson
House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
A Gathering of Old Men & A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines
Brown Girl, Brownstones, Paule Marshall
Home to Harlem, Claude McKay
Bluest Eye, & Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Linden Hills & Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor
Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje
Black Boy & Native Son, Richard Wright
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
NONFICTION
House of Houses, Pat Mora
Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA, Luis Rodriguez
A Taste of Power, Elaine Brown
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