AP Literature and Composition
Cargin
Summer Reading for the 2011-2012 School Year
Welcome to AP Literature and Composition, a year long intensive study of World Literature.
The first requirement for the course is that you are able to read this packet. If you are unable to read
the next two pages, you may not be a candidate for a course centered on college level reading. I have
had students in the past who were incapable of such a daunting task, and I certainly do not wish for
you to suffer their same fate. If you feel able, then proceed.
Your summer reading project will require you to read two novels before the start of school,
and that you interact with these novels in ways both analytical and interpretive. Simply summarizing
what you’ve read will never be a sufficient response to the literature required for this class. One of the
goals of the course is to help students approach literature in sophisticated ways, to notice various
elements of prose, poetry, and drama, including both the resources of language and elements of
storytelling that writers employ to contribute to meaning. You certainly are not expected to be able to
do any of this yet; we will work toward this goal as the year progresses.
You may not choose the following novels/plays, as we will read them in class:
Heart of Darkness
Oedipus Rex
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
The Handmaid’s Tale
You will need a copy of David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction to use during class. If you know a
graduate who took this course, they may sell or give you one. You will not need this book until after
school starts, so I will place an order then for those students who still need a copy.
Additionally, if possible please view the movies The Fighter and Inception as I refer to them
often when discussing literary concepts. (This is not a requirement – just a suggestion.) In the horrific
and inexcusable case that you have not read the Harry Potter series, at least watch a movie, and then
pretend that you have read them so that I won’t think less of you. I’d love to make them required
reading but cannot justify them in a college level course as 3rd graders can and do read them.
As you read BOTH of the following novels, write in the margins, underline or highlight what
strikes you, and note symbols, themes, style of writing, characterization or anything else of interest. (If
it is not a book you can write in, just take notes or use post-it notes.) You do not need to write so much
that it impedes enjoyment, but enough that you can discuss the novel intelligently.
Novel One: Novel of Literary Merit – Your Choice.
The first novel that you will read is a work of literary merit of your own choosing. I have
included two AP lists, but you are not limited to these lists as long as your choice is considered to be
of literary merit. I need to approve your choice if it is not on the list. Usually any book by a listed
author is acceptable, but check with me first. PLEASE find a novel that interests you and will be
enjoyable to read. If you start a novel and hate it, choose another. This novel should not feel like a
school assignment, but rather a book that you have always wanted to read but might not choose
without nudging. You are more than welcome to choose the same novel as a classmate, and to work
through and discuss it together.
Sometime during the first few days of school, you will take a timed written test using this
novel. You MUST have this book with you. I will NOT be collecting or assessing your notes; their
purpose is to enhance your understanding of the novel. Be prepared to write/discuss thoughtfully on
this book.
Novel Two: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
You will also read and need a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Published in
1951, the book is one world’s top selling novels and has been on high school and college reading lists
for 60 years. Paradoxically, it is one of the most “banned” books of all time. I will be interested in
hearing your ideas on why this is so, after you’ve read the book. You must also have this novel with
you during the first few weeks of school, as I will begin teaching literary terms and concepts using this
novel right from the start.
If you have already read this title, please re-read it. Catcher in the Rye is a novel that can and
should be read multiple times.
The novel follows the story of Holden Caulfield, a prep school drop out grappling with the
death of his brother. Set in the late 1940s, the plot is less important than the characters of the novel.
The protagonist, Holden, is unforgettably funny, sarcastic, and heartbreaking. He is worth getting to
know.
Spark Notes and other Literature Guides.
Frequently you will be asked to read challenging literature. We will work together to help
make sense of assigned reading, and I will show you good sources to seek when you need extra help in
deciphering meaning. Spark Notes is often a good source, written by graduate students in Literature.
However, the authors of Spark Notes (and other online sources) have years more experience than you
in analyzing literature. My main issue with using outside sources (aside from plagiarism) is student’s
own interpretation is often diminished in the process. Please avoid outside sources for your summer
assignment because I am interested in your own reactions to the reading, not the regurgitated thoughts
of literature experts. If you do use an outside source for help, continue to trust your own ideas. You are
welcome and encouraged to talk to each other about your reading. Hearing the response of your peers
often helps you formulate your own ideas. Also, you are welcome to e-mail me with questions or
concerns.
Contact Information:
This summer reading assignment should also be posted on the Central HS web site by lateJune. I will check my email regularly, and respond to you as quickly as possible. My address is
carginb@wcsoh.org I look forward to meeting everyone as a class in August! – Bridget Cargin
The following are TWO AP lists. You can assume that other novels by the same author
will be acceptable choices, but check with me first. You may also go on-line and peruse
other AP reading lists (there are many). The dates on the second list show the years in
which the novel appeared on the AP exam for the choice essay. Do not let this worry you
or inform your choice. Please choose a novel of interest.
Fiction
A, B
Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart)
Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies)
Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim)
Martin Amis (Time's Arrow)
Rudolfo Anaya (Serafina's Stories)
Margaret Atwood ( Alias Grace, Surfacing)
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain)
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)
Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)
Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)
C
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities, The Baron in the Trees)
Albert Camus (The Plague, The Stranger)
Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
Raymond Carver (Cathedral)
Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop, O Pioneers!)
Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street)
John Cheever (The Wapshot Scandal)
Kate Chopin (The Awakening)
Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage)
D
Louis DeBernieres (Corelli's Mandolin)
Don DeLillo (Libra)
Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day)
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations)
E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Idiot)
Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie)
E, F
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man)
Louise Erdich (Antelope Wife)
William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury)
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited)
Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier)
E.M. Forster (A Passage to India)
John Fowles (The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Magus)
G, H
Myla Goldberg (Bee Season)
Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter)
Jane Hamilton (A Map of the World, The Book of Ruth)
Thomas Hardy (Tess of the D'Urbervilles)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, Islands in the Stream)
Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha)
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
I, J, K
Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day)
Henry James (The Aspern Papers, The American)
Ha Jin (Waiting)
James Joyce (Dubliners)
Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis)
Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior)
Joy Kogawa (Obasan)
Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
L, M
Margaret Laurence (The Stone Angel)
D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers)
Bernard Malamud (The Fixer, The Natural)
Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party and Other Stories)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Bobbie Ann Mason (In Country)
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian)
Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding)
Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd)
Toni Morrison (Jazz, Beloved, Song of Solomon)
Bharati Mukherjee (Desirable Daughters, Tree Bride)
N, O, P
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Joyce Carol Oates (We Were the Mulvaneys)
Tim O'Brien (Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods)
Flannery O'Connor (Wise Blood)
George Orwell (1984)
Cynthia Ozick (Heir to the Glimmering World)
Alan Paton (Cry the Beloved Country)
Iain Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost)
Katherine Anne Porter (Ship of Fools)
R, S, T
Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front)
Jean Rhys (Voyage in the Dark)
JeanPaul Sartre (No Exit)
Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
Jean Toomer (Cane)
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (Fathers and Sons)
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
U, V, W
John Updike (Gertrude and Claudius)
Luisa Valenzuela (Clara)
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse Five)
Alice Walker (Temple of My Familiar)
Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One)
Eudora Welty (The Optimist's Daughter)
Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth)
John Edgar Wideman (Brothers and Keepers)
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
Richard Wright (Native Son)
AP Suggested Reading List
( Alphabetical list,
frequency list)
WORKS LISTED ON AP ENGLISH LITERATURE EXAM-AMERICAN
Author
Title
Exam Years
Albee THE ZOO STORY 82, 01
Albee WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINA WOOLF 88, 94, 00, 04, 07
Alcott LITTLE WOMEN 08
Anaya BLESS ME, ULTIMA
94, 96, 97, 99, 04, 05, 06, 08
Baldwin GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN
88, 90, 05, 09
Baraka, Amiri and Leroi Jones DUTCHMAN 03, 06
Bauermister THE DOLLMAKER 91
Bulosan, Carlos AMERICA IS IN THE HEART 95
Cao
MONKEY BRIDGE 00, 03
Cather MY ANTONIA
94, 03, 06, 08
Cisneros THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET 08
Chopin THE AWAKENING 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 99, 02, 04, 07, 09
Davis FIFTH BUSINESS 00, 07
de Crevecoeur LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER 76
Doctorow RAGTIME 03, 07
Dos Passos U.S.A. (trilogy) 09
Dreiser AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY 82, 95, 03
Dreiser SISTER CARRIE 87, 94, 02, 04, 09
Ellison INVISIBLE MAN 76, 78, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 01, 03, 04,
05, 07, 08, 09
Erdrich LOVE MEDICINE 95
Erdrich TRACKS 05
Faulkner
ABSALOM, ABSALOM
76, 00
Faulkner
LIGHT IN AUGUST 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 91, 94, 95, 99, 03, 06
Faulkner
SOUND AND THE FURY
86, 97, 01, 07, 08
Faulkner
THE BEAR
94, 06
Faulkner
AS I LAY DYING 78, 89, 90, 94, 01, 04, 06, 07, 09
Fitzgerald
GREAT GATSBY 82, 83, 88, 91, 92, 97, 00, 02, 04, 05, 07
Ford THE GOOD SOLDIER 00
Frazier COLD MOUNTAIN 06,08
Gaines A GATHERING OF OLD MEN 00
Gaines A LESSON BEFORE DYING 99
Glaspell
TRIFLES 00
Guterson
SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS 00
Hamilton THE FEDERALIST 76
Hansberry
RAISIN IN THE SUN
87, 90, 92, 94, 96, 99, 07, 09
Hawthorne
HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES 89, 96
Hawthorne
THE SCARLET LETTER
78, 83, 88, 91, 99, 02, 04, 05
Heller CATCH-22
82, 85, 87, 89, 94, 01, 03, 04, 05, 07, 08
Hellman LITTLE FOXES 85, 90
Hemingway
A FAREWELL TO ARMS
91, 99, 04, 09
Hemingway FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS 03, 06
Hemingway
THE SUN ALSO RISES
85, 91, 95, 04 ,05
Hosseini
KITE RUNNER
07, 08, 09
Hurston THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 04 ,05, 06, 07, 08
Irving A PRAYER FRO OWEN MEANY 09
James DAISY MILLER
97, 03
James PORTRAIT OF A LADY
88, 92, 96, 03, 05, 07
James THE AMERICAN
05
James THE GOLDEN BOWL 09
James TURN OF THE SCREW
92, 94, 00, 02, 04, 08
James WASHINGTON SQUARE
90
Jen TYPICAL AMERICAN 02, 03, 05
Johnson AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN
02, 05
Kesey ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 01
Kingston
WOMAN WARRIOR 91, 08
Knowles A SEPARATE PEACE
82, 07
Kushner ANGELS IN AMERICA 09
Lee A GESTURE LIFE 04, 05
Lee NATIVE SPEAKER 99, 03, 05, 07, 08
Lee TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 08, 09
Maclean A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT 08
MacLeish
J.B. 81, 94
Mailer ARMIES OF THE NIGHT 76
McCarthy
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES 95, 96, 06, 07, 08
McCarthy
THE CROSSING 09
McCullers
THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING
97
Malamud
The Fixer
07
Melville
BENITO CERENO 89
Melville
BILLY BUDD
79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 99, 02, 04, 05, 07, 08
Melville
MOBY DICK
76, 78, 79, 80, 83, 89, 94, 96, 01, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 09
Melville
REDBURN 87
Miller A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE 94
Miller ALL MY SONS 85, 90
Miller DEATH OF A SALESMAN 86, 88, 94, 03, 04, 05, 07
Miller THE CRUCIBLE 83, 87, 04, 05, 09
Momaday HOUSE MADE OF DAWN
95, 06, 09
Morrison
SONG OF SOLOMON 81, 88, 96, 00, 04, 05, 06, 07
Morrison
SULA 92, 97, 04, 07, 08
Morrison
BELOVED 90, 94, 99, 01, 03 ,05, 07, 09
Morrison
THE BLUEST EYE 95, 08, 09
Mukerjee
JASMINE 99
Naylor THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE 09
Norris THE OCTOPUS 09
Ng
BONE: A NOVEL
03
O'Brien GOING AFTER CACCIATO 01
O'Brien IN THE LAKE OF THE WOODS
00
O'Brien THE THINGS THEY CARRIED 04, 09
O'Connor
WISE BLOOD
95
O'Neill
DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS 81
O'Neill LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT 90, 03, 07
O'Neill MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
94
O'Neill THE HAIRY APE 89
Oates WE WERE THE MULVANEYS 07
Pielmeier
AGNES OF GOD 00
Potok THE CHOSEN 08
Potok MY NAME IS ASHER LEV 03
Proulx THE SHIPPING NEWS
97
Rolvaag GIANTS IN THE EARTH 94
Roth
AMERICAN PASTORAL 09
Salinger THE CATCHER IN THE RYE 01, 08
Sapphire PUSH 07
Saroyan THE HUMAN COMEDY
94
Silko CEREMONY
94, 96, 97, 99, 01, 03, 05, 06, 07, 09
Sinclair THE JUNGLE 77, 78, 82, 88, 89, 90, 96, 09
Smiley THOUSNAD ACRES 06
Steinbeck EAST OF EDEN 06
Steinbeck
GRAPES OF WRATH 81, 85, 87, 95, 03
Steinbeck
OF MICE AND MEN 01
Stowe UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
87, 09
Styron SOPHIE"S CHOICE 09
Tan THE JOY LUCK CLUB
97, 04
Tan THE BONESETTER'S DAUGHTER 06, 07
Thoreau CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
76
Twain HUCKLEBERRY FINN
80, 82, 85, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 05, 06, 07, 08
Tyler DINNER AT THE HOMESICK RESTAURANT
97
Updike THE CENTAUR 81
Villarreal POCHO 02, 08
Vonnegut
SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE 91, 04
Walker THE COLOR PURPLE
91, 92, 94, 96, 97, 05, 08, 09
Warren ALL THE KING'S MEN
00, 02, 04, 07, 08, 09
Welch WINTER IN THE BLOOD 95
Welty DELTA WEDDING 97
Welty THE OPTIMIST'S DAUGHTER 94
Wharton ETHAN FROME 80, 95, 03, 05, 06, 07
Wharton THE AGE OF INNOCENCE 97, 02, 03, 08
Wharton THE HOUSE OF MIRTH 04, 07
Wideman SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY 03
Wilde THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY 02
Wilder OUR TOWN
86, 97, 09
Williams
CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF 00
Williams
STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE 91, 92, 01, 04, 07, 08, 09
Williams
THE GLASS MENAGERIE 90, 94, 97, 99, 02, 08, 09
Wilson FENCES 02, 03, 05, 09
Wilson JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE
00, 04
Wilson THE PIANO LESSON
96, 99, 07, 08
Wolfe YOU CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN 94<
Wolff OLD SCHOOL 08
Wright NATIVE SON
79, 82, 85, 87, 89, 01, 04, 09
Wright BLACK BOY
06, 08