June 2015
Dear Parents and Students,
Greetings from Putney.
Listed below are reading suggestions from The Putney School that are fun,
challenging, and good background for high school classes. We ask that each
student read at least one book from these lists; we expect that most will read
more than one. While these lists are somewhat arbitrary—obviously, there are
countless books of literary merit from which to choose—these provide a good
place to start. Reading over the summer is essential for satisfaction and success
in our courses at this level.
English Department Suggestions
Ninth and Tenth Grades
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Adichie
Black Boy by Richard Wright
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
The Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zoey by J.D. Salinger
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mona and the Promised Land by Gish Jen
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
The Color of Water by James McBride
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
1984 by George Orwell
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Into the Wild or Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Any poetry collection
Eleventh and Twelfth Grades
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr
Night by Eli Wiesel
Three by Flannery O’Connor
Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet
Heart Songs and Other Stories by Annie Proulx
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Foer
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Sula by Toni Morrison
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Any poetry collection.
New speakers of English
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
Animal Farm by George Orwell
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
Any short story or poetry collection
If You Dare...
Middlemarch by George Eliot
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Paradise by Toni Morrison
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
History Department Suggestions
Ninth Grade
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
The Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
The Education of Little Tree by Asa Earl Carter
Tenth Grade
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Germinal by Emile Zola
Candide by Voltaire
The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
Guns, Germ and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Eleventh Grade
Don't Know Much About History by Kenneth Davis
The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
Twelfth Grade
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
The Great Unravelling: Losing Our Way in the New Century by Paul Krugman
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Language Department Suggestions
For students entering Chinese 1,2,3
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by PeterHessler
China Road by Rob Gifford
For students entering French 1 and 2
Au Contraire! Figuring Out the French, 2nd Edition, by Gilles Asselin and Ruth
Mastron
For students entering French 3
Au Contraire! Figuring Out the French, 2nd Edition, by Gilles Asselin and Ruth
Mastron
La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
For students enteringFrench 4
Au Contraire! Figuring Out the French, 2nd Edition, by Gilles Asselin and Ruth
Mastron
La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For students entering French 5
Au Contraire! Figuring Out the French, 2nd Edition, by Gilles Asselin and Ruth
Mastron
La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont
Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
French Stories/Contes Français, a dual-language book, edited by Wallace Fowlie
For students entering Spanish 2
El misterio de la Llave, Spanish Edition, by Elsa Moreno or
Vuelo 505 con destino a Carácas, Spanish Edition, by Neus Sans and Lourdes
Miquel
For students entering Spanish 3
Los Templarios ye el secreto de Cristobal Colón, 2011 Spanish Edition by David
Childress or Crónica de una muerte anunciada, Spanish Edition by Gabriel
García Márquez
For students entering Spanish 4, 5 and 6
Fabricantes de Miseria, Spanish Edition, by Plinio Mendoza, Carlos montaner
and Alvaro Llosa or
El regreso del idiota, Spanish Edition, by Plinio Mendoza
Math Department Suggestions
Non-Fiction:
Freakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Proofiness by Charles Seife
The Joy of x: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Stephen Strogatz
Fiction:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis (Graphic novel)
Science Department Suggestions
Physics for Future Presidents by Richard A. Muller
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
by James Watson
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
The Power of Place by Winifred Gallagher
The Outside Story edited by Chuck Wooster
Archimedes to Hawking by Clifford Pickover
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics by
Leonard Susskind
Art Department Suggestions
Ways of Seeing by John Berger
How Music Works by David Byrne