AP English Novels and Plays
1984 – George Orwell (British)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description George Orwell's celebrated 1948 vision of a world subsumed in tyranny and war. It describes the sequence of events by
which Winston Smith, a London clerk at the Ministry of Truth, comes to understand the true nature and aims of the government he
serves, and portrays his doomed efforts to create a private life for himself and his lover Julia. One of the bleakest political novels
ever written, "1984" illustrates Orwell's despair that democracy could ever summon the will to overcome communism in his lifetime.
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description "Absalom, Absalom!" is often considered to be Faulkner's greatest book, and one of his most compelling explorations of
race, gender, and the burdens of the past. The plot revolves around the character of Thomas Sutpen, son of poor whites in
Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Densely written and notoriously "difficult," the novel explores the question of why
Sutpen's son, Henry, killed Charles Bon, his friend and classmate, and the suitor of his sister, Judith. The action shifts from the early
19th century, when this event took place, to the "present" (1909-1910), when Quentin Compson, a student at Harvard, becomes
obsessed with discovering the truth about his ancestor Sutpen--and hence about his family's past--and the relevance of that truth to
the present.
Adam Bede – George Eliot (British)
528 pages / 1260 Lexile
Description: It tells of a young carpenter and his love for the pretty and superficial Hetty Sorrel who murders her illegitimate child
by Arthur Donnithorne, a young country squire, and is sentenced to deportation, and his eventual marriage to Dinah Morris, a
Methodist preacher.
The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn – Mark Twain (American)
320 pages / 980 Lexile
Description: The story of Huck's and Jim's quest for freedom on a raft on the Mississippi provides a panoramic view of Southern
society, which Twain saw as beset by greed, violence, and coldhearted brutality. At the end, Huck definitively abandons the
conventional cant which he has been raised to believe in when he makes the decision to go to hell rather than betray his friend Jim
and send him back to slavery. The book has been banned from time to time, beginning with its publication when it was deemed too
subversive for children, until in the late 20th century when, despite its sympathetic attitude toward blacks and is violent
denunciation of slavery, it has been branded racist largely because Twain's use of dialect and "offensive" language.
The Aeneid – Virgil (Greek/Latin)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Book XI of the Aeneid covers four crucial days in Aeneas struggle against the Latins. In it, Virgil gives us the funeral of
Pallas, the great Latin war-council, Turnus plan to ambush Aeneas, and the aristeia and death of Camilla. K. W. Gransden sees the
second half of the Roman national epic as Virgils Iliad. In his introduction and commentary, he relates the themes and structure of
Book XI not only to the rest of the Aeneid but also to relevant passages in the Iliad. Gransden shows how, despite his adoption of the
epic form, Virgil's style is influenced by Alexandrian miniaturism, Callimachean theory, and the poetry of the neoteroi
The Age Of Innocence – Edith Wharton (American)
400 pages / 1170 Lexile
Description: This is Edith Wharton's insider's look, and subtle critique, of New York society at a time when an address above 12th
Street was considered the wild frontier. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE plays out the delicacies of a love triangle between May Welland,
born and bred to marry Newland Archer, a thoughtful barrister, who in turn loves the infamous, unconventional, and attractive,
Countess Ellen Olenska. The brazen Countess has left her Count behind in Europe and has returned to New York for a reprieve from
a bad marriage. Not only does Wharton paint a deliciously detailed portrait of old New York and the rules that governed upper-class
society, she has also provided readers with an entertainment of high order.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll (British)
196 pages / 980 Lexile
Description: As he escorted the three young daughters of a colleague on a trip up the river Isis, Lewis Carroll invented "Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland," the story of a little girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole. Full of such wonderfully eccentric characters as
the Queen of Hearts, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle, and the Mad Hatter. The book is
simultaneously a political allegory, a parody of Victorian children's literature, a fairy tale, a dream, and a child's chronicle of growing
up.
All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy (American)
320 pages / 940 Lexile
Description: This National Book Award winner tells the story of John Grady Cole who, at 16, finds himself at the dying end of a long
line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. "A true American original."--Newsweek.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay – Michael Chabon (American)
656 pages / 1170 Lexile
Description: It would make a nice comic book series--the cousins square-jawed and ham-fisted--but the depth of Chabon's thought,
his sharp language, his inventiveness and his ambition make this a novel of towering achievement.
Amelia – Henry Fielding (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Amelia is tried to the utmost by the vagaries of her wilful, reckless husband, Captain Booth, but remains both lovable
and loving under the severest tests.
America is in the Heart – Carlos Bulosan (Filipino)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: First published in 1946, this autobiography of the well-known Filipino poet describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his
voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West. Bulosan
does not spare the reader any of the horrors that accompanied the migrant's life; but his quiet, stoic voice is the most convincing
witness to the terrible events he saw.
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Set for the most part in New Jersey and spanning the period from the Second World War to the mid-1970s, this novel is
narrated by Nathan Zuckerman.As the book opens, Zuckerman "recalls an innocent time when golden boy Seymour 'the Swede'
Levov was the pride of his Jewish neighborhood. . . . {He then goes on to relate} how the Swede's life . . . {was} devastated by a
child's violent act. When Merry Levov blew up her quaint little town's post office to protest the Viet Nam war, she didn't just kill
passing physician Fred Conlon, she shattered the ties that bound her to her worshipful father. Merry disappears, then eventually
reappears as a stick-thin Jain living in sacred poverty in Newark, having killed three more people for the cause." (Libr J)
Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt (British)
368 pages / 1110 Lexile
Description: Sometimes it's worth the wait. Having waited 40 years to tell his story, Frank McCourt doesn't pull any punches in his
story of growing up dirt poor in Limerick, Ireland. Having emigrated to America, McCourt's family returns to Ireland after his sister
dies in Brooklyn. It is there that things turn from bad to worse
Angles of Repose – Wallace Stegner
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--the magnificent story of four generations in the life of an American family. A
wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The
unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece.
Animal Farm – George Orwell (British)
144 pages / 1170 Lexile
Description: A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to
create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned--a
razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
808 pages / 1080 Lexile
Description: Anna Karenina is the wife of a prominent Russian government official. She leads a correct but confining upper-middleclass existence. She seems content with her life as a proper companion to her dignified, unaffectionate husband and an adoring
mother to her young son, until she meets Count Vronsky, a young officer of the guards. He pursues her and she falls madly in love
with him. Her husband refuses to divorce her, so she gives up everything, including her beloved son, to be with Vronsky. After a
short time, Vronsky becomes bored and unhappy with their life as social outcasts. He abandons her, returns to the military and is
immediately accepted back into society. Anna, a fallen woman, shunned by respectable society, throws herself under a train.
Another Country – James Baldwin (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description Rufus, a black artist, falls in love with a white woman, but becomes enraged by the world's response to their affair,
eventually driving his beloved mad and committing suicide himself. The title refers to exile, racism, and sexual love.
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Theodore, a young man nauseated by the facile piety and hollow curriculum of the school where he teaches, gives up
his job to return to his father’s house, to the literary and artistic London-which is not much better than the academic world.
Atonement – Ian McEwan
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and
war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the
difficulty of absolution.
Antony and Cleopatra – William Shakespeare (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description The queen of the Nile meets her match in Marc Antony, and the lovers destroy each other--yet triumph in ruin--in this
great romantic tragedy.
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz – Mordecai Richler (Canadian)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Duddy--the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal--is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and
totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand
plan to "be somebody," Duddy learns about living--and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy.
As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz becomes a lesson for us
all...in laughter and in life.
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner (American)
288 pages / 870 Lexile
Description: "As I Lay Dying", a stream-of-consciousness novel narrated from 15 different points of view, depicts the Bundren family,
a clan of poor whites who travel to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury their dead matriarch, Addie. This bleakly comic novel explores the
nature of grief, community, and family.
As You Like It – William Shakespeare (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description This virtuoso performance of Shakespeare's idyllic romance contains an optimistic philosophy of simple goodness.
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand (American)
1088 pages / 1070 Lexile
Description: The story of a man who said he would stop the motor of the world--and did. This novel is the setting for the author's
philosophy of Objectivism.
The Awakening – Kate Chopin (American)
128 pages / 960 Lexile
Description: Here is the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother. Edna experiences the first pangs of passion and desire-an awakening so intense that Edna compromises herself--changing her life forever. Chopin's portrayal of a woman's quest for
freedom is considered a landmark in American fiction.
Babbit – Sinclair Lewis (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Sinclair Lewis created one of the most compelling and disturbing characters of American fiction in this portrait of a
hardened, conniving, social-climbing real-estate man in his classic work "Babbit". Through detailed depictions of the protagonist's
home, work, and social life, a meticulous landscape is created, representing the beliefs, aspirations, and failures of the American
middle class.
Barchester Towers – Anthony Trollope (British)
576 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description The second novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire continues the story of the conflict between High and Low Church
begun in "The Warden". Trollope introduces Mrs. Proudie, the bishop's wife, one of his most famously despicable characters. The
plot revolves around the power struggle between her and Mr. Slope, the bishop's chaplain, for control of diocesan politics.
Being Dead – Jim Crace
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The story is the least likely page-turner I've ever come across, and one of the most gripping. Its present action takes us
from the moment just after their death through their gradual decomposition, their corporeal transition from zoology to botany, until
they are discovered days later, and the earth upon which their corpses had been sprawled gradually erases any evidence that they
were there: The sea grasses unbend themselves; the flies and crabs and gulls that ate their fluids and flesh are hungry again; the sea
wind blows; the indentations their bodies made on the sand dune drift over. Along the way, Crace tells three other stories: the story
of their lives together, the story (in reverse chronological order) of their morning together, and the story of their colleagues and
relatives' search for the missing couple.
Bel Canto – Anne Patchett
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor
of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the
international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening -- until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the airconditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into
something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents
become compatriots.
Beloved – Toni Morrison (American)
288 pages / 870 Lexile
Description: Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni
Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.
Billy Budd – Herman Melville (American)
48 pages / 1450 Lexile
Description: Billy Budd, a handsome, angelic, and beloved young sailor, is wrongly accused of inciting mutiny. He lashes out in a
rage and accidentally kills his accuser, the demonic Claggart, with one blow. The ship's commander, Captain Vere, a conflicted man
of principle, cries, "Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang." And a court martial does indeed condemn the saintly
Billy to death. His last words are, "God bless Captain Vere." Billy Budd is widely interpreted as a Christ figure, the victim of a kind of
ritual sacrifice, after which order is restored. He is also seen as an innocent, Adam-like character who is destroyed by the evil that is
inescapable in the world.
Bleak House – Charles Dickens (British)
1032 pages / 1180 Lexile
Description: Dickens's classic tale of greed, duplicity, and corruption. The story revolves around an inheritance case, Jarndyce vs.
Jarndyce, that has been contested in the British courts for decades. Esther Summerson, the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock
and Captain Hawdon, lives at Bleak House as John Jarndyce's ward. She does not know the truth of her origins, and when the lawyer
Tulkinghorn begins to suspect her actual relation to Lady Dedlock, he is soon found murdered. Two of the heirs in the case, Richard
Carston and Ada Claire, marry and move into Bleak House with Jarndyce and Esther. The overwhelming irony in the novel is that, by
the time the case is finally settled, nothing remains of the estate.
Bless Me, Ultima – Rudolfo A. Anaya (Hispanic)
272 pages / 840 Lexile
Description A bildungsroman about a young Mexican-American boy, Antonio, in a New Mexican village during the 1940s. He faces a
choice that will determine the course of his entire life: to follow his father's family's nomadic lifestyle, or to settle down to
agriculture as his mother's family has done. Anaya draws on the Spanish-American folklore with which he grew up in this unique
depiction of childhood Hispanic in the Southwest.
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The Blind Assassin has enough mysteries to keep even a casual reader engaged, and with respect to solutions, it is less
scrupulously committed to ambiguity than Ms. Atwood's 1997 novel, Alias Grace. As with all of Ms. Atwood's recent fiction, The
Blind Assassin, despite what sounds like a romantic plot, has been scoured free of any trace of sentimentality. There is a steely
quality to Ms. Atwood's writing that's a bit scary but also exhilarating; no one gets away with anything, especially not her female
narrators--and they know better than to try.
Blindness – Jose Saramago (Portuguese)
# pages / # Lexile
Blindness has a real plot, inspires real terror, and -- although we never learn their names -- is about believable, sympathetic
characters. A man driving down the street in an unnamed city is suddenly struck blind, setting off a highly contagious plague of
"white sickness." The authorities take immediate but ultimately futile action by quarantining victims and potential victims in an illequipped abandoned mental hospital. Things rapidly deteriorate as food is hoarded, factions develop, and anarchy reigns. The one
true hero is referred to as the "doctor's wife," who willingly accompanies her blind husband, as she can still see, and acts as a liaison
between the blind and the rest of the world.
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison (American)
224 pages / 920 Lexile
Description: From the 1993 Nobel Prize-winner comes a novel "so charged with pain and wonder that it becomes poetry" (The New
York Times). First published in 1965, The Bluest Eye is the story of a black girl who prays--with unforeseen consequences--for her
eyes to turn blue so she will be accepted.
Brave New World – Alduous Huxley (British)
288 pages / 870 Lexile
Description: A satirical novel depicting a scientific and industrialized utopia in which Ford and Freud are worshipped, eugenics
policies have eliminated class conflicts (while strengthening the division of the classes), and personal unhappiness is assuaged
through drugs and pornography.
Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler
336 pages / 830 Lexile
Description: The author of the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning The Accidental Tourist pens another delightful tale of an ordinary
couple. The Morans are just average — she is scatterbrained and he whistles. Just when they think they've learned all there is to
know about each other, they find out how extraordinary they really are.
Bridge Over San Luis Rey – Thorton Wilder
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Wilder's most famous novel ponders the significance of a random disaster. An inexplicable tragedy, a monk's quest for
meaning: the story that earned Wilder the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes.
Brothers Karamozov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The passionate Karamozov brothers spring to life, led by their roue of a father, who entertains himself by drinking,
womanizing & pitting his three sons against each other. The men have plenty ot fight over, including the alluring Grushenka. In the
Idiot, meet the kindly, childlike Prince Myshkin, as he returns to the decandent social whirl of 1860's St. Petersburg. Soon, the two
most beautiful, sought after women in town are competing for his affections - in a duel that grows increasingly dangerous
Candide – Voltaire
128 pages / 1110 Lexile
Description: Candide is the story of a gentle man who, though pummeled and slapped in every direction by fate, clings desperately
to the belief that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds." On the surface a witty, bantering tale, this eighteenth-century classic is
actually a savage, satiric thrust at the philosophical optimism that proclaims that all disaster and human suffering is part of a
benevolent cosmic plan. Fast, funny, often outrageous, the French philosopher’s immortal narrative takes Candide around the world
to discover that -- contrary to the teachings of his distinguished tutor Dr. Pangloss- all is not always for the best. Alive with wit,
brilliance, and graceful storytelling, Candide has become Voltaire's most celebrated work.
Captains Courageous – Rudyard Kipling (British)
209 pages / 850 Lexile
Description: The boy hero is an American millionaire’s son, Harvey Cheyne. This spoiled youngster falls overboard, is picked up by a
fishing dory and against his will is hired by Disko Troop, the skipper, at ten dollars a month. By the time the fishing season is over, he
has a different and much more health attitude toward life.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of seething passions that beset a Southern family in a shattering moment of
revelation.
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (American)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description Joseph Heller's manic, bleak, blackly humorous, and brilliant novel has become a classic of American literature, and
"Catch-22" has entered the language as a term describing a no-win situation. Set during the last months of World War II, Heller's
novel tells the story of a bombardier, the hapless Yossarian, who is convinced--quite rightly, of course--that people are trying to kill
him.
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (American)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: J. D. Salinger's famous and enduring chronicle of Holden Caulfield's journey from innocence to experience is the
quintessential coming-of-age novel. Holden runs away to New York City from his vulgar and stifling prep school full of "phonies."
After a series of illuminating failures and disasters, he goes home to see his beloved sister Phoebe, and finally--through Phoebe--is
able to accept his existence in an imperfect world.
Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood (American)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description The contemporary story of a woman grappling with the tangled knot of her life. Returning to Toronto, the city of her
youth, for a retrospective of her art, controversial painter Elaine Risley is engulfed by vivid images of the past. Strongest of all is the
figure of Cordelia, leader of the trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret worlds of friendship,
longing, and betrayal.
Ceremony – Leslie M. Silko (American)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: "Demanding but confident and beautifully written" (Boston Globe), this is the story of a young Native American
returning to his reservation after surviving the horrors of captivity as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II. Drawn to his
Indian past and its traditions, his search for comfort and resolution becomes a ritual--a curative ceremony that defeats his despair.
Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a wounded and soul-sick Confederate soldier who, like his literary fellow-traveler
Odysseus, has quit the field of battle only to find the way home littered with impediments and prowled by adversaries. Inman's
Penelope is Ada, a headstrong belle who has forsaken her place in Charleston society in order to accompany her father -- a
tubercular southern gentleman turned missionary -- to a new home in the healthy mountain air of North Carolina. Frazier divides the
narrative between Inman's homeward progress and Ada's struggle to make it on her own after her father dies, establishing an
underlying tension that is at once subtle and irresistible.
The Collector – John Robert Fowles (British)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: A psychological thriller involving a repressed clerk and butterfly collector who spends a fortune won on the football
pools on the kidnapping of an art student Miranda; the novel ends with her death and his plans to add another specimen to his
collection.
The Color Purple – Alice Walker (American)
304 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being
abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her
marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's
letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug,
pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an
old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting,
do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan
Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul.
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Russian)
576 pages / 990 Lexile
Description This 1866 novel is Dostoevsky's great fictional study of the criminal mind, in the character of the student Raskolnikov,
who murders an aged pawnbroker. Initially, Raskolnikov believes that the killing was entirely justified, but as the novel proceeds he
becomes tortured by his guilt, and begins to question all his most passionately held beliefs. Eventually, while the wily police
inspector Porfiry Petrovich simply waits, Raskolnikov--prompted by Sonia, a prostitute who is devoted to him--breaks down and
confesses. Despite its bleak subject matter, the novel holds out the possibility of redemption; it is also an indictment of the social
conditions in which the action unfolds.
Crome Yellow – Aldous Huxley (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: An amusing satire on the ill-fated love affair of sensitive young poet, Denis Stone.
The Crossing – Cormac McCarthy (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: This second volume of the Border Trilogy is about Billy and Boyd Parham, two brothers who explore the frontier in the
boot heel of New Mexico. When Billy returns after a long absence, he discovers that everything that he left behind has been
transformed. It is then that he and his brother strike out into the unknown frontier. McCarthy, author of "All the Pretty Horses," has
been compared to everyone from Hemingway to Faulkner.
Cry the Beloved Country – Alan Paton (South African)
320 pages / 860 Lexile
Description: Paton's deeply moving story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the backdrop of a land
and people riven by racial inequality and injustice, remains the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history.
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostland
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Edmond Rostand's bittersweet melodrama tells the tale of France's master swordsman--Cyrano de Bergerac, a valiant
soldier cursed with the face of a clown. Gallantry, love, poetry, and failure all combine in this timeless classic.
Daisy Miller – Henry James (American)
128 pages / 850 Lexile
Description "Daisy Miller" is often thought of as the quintessential James novel: the story of the innocent abroad who is corrupted
by contact with an older, more sophisticated society. Daisy, a delightfully uninhibited young American, scandalizes the European
community in which she is a visitor with her high spirits and disregard of ancient conventions. After an innocent but unwise tryst
with an Italian admirer to see the Coliseum in Rome by moonlight, Daisy contracts malaria and dies. The pathos of her death is
compounded by the fact that another admirer, Winterbourne, is never entirely convinced that Daisy is merely the frank, innocent
girl she seems.
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (British)
420 pages / 740 Lexile
Description: Dickens's classic autobiographical novel, describing a young man's rise in the world. David Copperfield, the narrator, is
orphaned at a tender age and raised first by his brutal stepfather (who halts his schooling and sends him to work in a factory), then
by a kindly aunt. He trains for a career in law, but eventually becomes a journalist and author. An ill-advised marriage brings him
considerable unhappiness, but not long after his wife's death he is reunited with his childhood sweetheart. A sprawling portrait of
life in Victorian England, DAVID COPPERFIELD is perhaps Dickens's most popular work, and it contains many of the characters--Mr.
Micawber, Uriah Heep, Betsey Trotwood, Steerforth, and Little Emily--who gave Dickens his reputation as the finest literary
portraitist of his age.
The Dead – James Joyce (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Willy Loman is a middle-class salesman with a loving wife, Linda, and two sons, Biff and Happy. Biff is now in his 30s, a
former high school football hero who wants to start a sporting goods store but has been unable to find the money to do so. Willy has
also tried to raise Happy to be a man of influence, but has failed at that. Willy's life of pathos and tragedy has, in this play, become
an embodiment of the pursuit of the American Dream, a pursuit gone sour.
Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: It recounts the chequered career of Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from Scone College, Oxford, for “indecent
behavior,” as the innocent victim of a drunken orgy. Forced to abandon a career in the church, he becomes a schoolmaster at
Llanabba Castle, where he encounters headmaster Fagan and his daughters.
Delta Wedding – Eudora Welty (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description A domestic novel set in Mississippi, by the famed Southern writer. Set on a plantation in the Mississippi delta, it portrays
the daily dramas of the Fairchild family as Dabney Fairchild prepares for her wedding.
Dinner at a Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler (American)
336 pages / 720 Lexile
Description: With her grown children gathered around her, the dying Pearl Tull recalls the difficult years she spent raising them
after their father's abrupt departure.
Dirt Music – Tim Winton (Australian)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman — an amateur. Before everyone in his
family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back
on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain. One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland.
Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous
fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the
water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on
conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it
is — and out on White Point it is very dangerous.
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzer
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Disgrace--set in post-apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape--is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A
heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and
love.
Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Ibsen's tragedies of common people along with his staging and dialogue revolutionized modern concepts of drama.
This edition contains three of Ibsen's major works, in which his political and social satires expose the narrow provincialism of
Norwegian town life.
Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Mr. Dombey is a purse-proud, self-contained London merchant, living in Portland Place, Bryanstone Square, with
offices in the city. His god is wealth, and his one ambition is to have a son, that the firm may be known as “Dombey and
Son.” When Paul is born, his ambition is attained; his whole heart is in the boy, and the loss of the mother is but a small matter. The
boy’s death turns his heart to stone, and he treats his daughter Florence not only with utter indifference, but as an actual interloper.
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Spanish)
1056 pages / 1410 Lexile
Description: "Don Quixote" is the story of an aging gentleman who decides that he is a latter-day knight-errant, bound to sally forth
to defend the world from evil. He enlists as his squire a neighboring peasant, Sancho Panza. Together they have many adventures
across Spain until the gentleman's friends are able to convince him to return home and resume his old life.
Dr. Faustus - Christopher J. Marlowe
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The story of a controversial, disreputable astrologer in Germany during the 1500's.
The Egoist – George Meredith (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The central character, the Egoist himself, is Sir Willoughby Patterne, rich and handsome, with a high position in the
country, but totally blind to his own arrogance and to the needs of the women he loves.
Emma – Jane Austen (British)
488 pages / 1080 Lexile
Description: First published in 1816, EMMA is about an unconventional heroine who possesses beauty, power, confidence, and
wealth. She is also opinionated and judgmental, scheming and cunning. She attempts to match an orphaned young woman, Harriet
Smith, with someone of a higher-born class, instead of the farmer Harriet prefers. The novel follows the two women as they weave
in and out of love relationships that mirror the social climb. Denied any other way to advance, the women in Austen's novels must
marry to get ahead.
Empire Falls – Richard Russo
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Richard Russo's most ambitious novel is also his most gracefully told. Sweeping in its social scope but also achingly
personal and beautifully detailed, Empire Falls is a subtle drama about the plight of the working class in a decaying Northeast mill
town.
An Enemy of the People - Henrik Ibsen (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Five-act drama by Henrik Ibsen, published in 1882 as En folkefiende and performed in 1883. An Enemy of the People
concerns the actions of Doctor Thomas Stockmann, a medical officer charged with inspecting the public baths on which the
prosperity of his native town depends. He finds the water to be contaminated. When he refuses to be silenced, he is declared an
enemy of the people. Stockmann served as a spokesman for Ibsen, who felt that his plays gave a true, if not always palatable, picture
of life and that truth was more important than critical approbation.
Equus – Peter Shaffer (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: In Equus, which took critics and public alike by storm and has gone on to become a modern classic, Peter Shaffer
depicts the story of a deranged youth who blinds six horses with a spike. Through a psychiatrist's analysis of the events, Shaffer
creates a chilling portrait of how materialism and convenience have killed our capacity for worship and passion and, consequently,
our capacity for pain. Rarely has a playwright created an atmosphere and situation that so harshly pinpoint the spiritual and mental
decay of modern man.
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton (American)
138 pages / 820 Lexile
Description This tragic short novel tells the tale of Ethan Frome, who lives an isolated life in cold New England. When his mother
dies, he marries his cousin Zeena for companionship, rather than for love. When they hire Mattie Silver as a live-in household helper,
Ethan and the young Mattie fall desperately in love. Inevitably, Zeena discovers the affair.
The Eumenidies – Aeschylus
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The cycle of revenge in the Agamemnon family continues as the ghost of Clytemnestra calls upon the Furies to seek
vengeance on her son, Orestes. The gods step in to prevent any more violence, and Athena declares that she will preside over a trial
in which Orestes stands accused of matricide, with Apollo acting in his defense. After the acquittal of Orestes, the Furies threaten
mass destruction and chaos in response to what they deem to be a vile injustice. But after Athena quiets their rage with
compassionate speeches, calm is once more restored after generations of violence and hatred. The chorus exits triumphantly in
celebration of peace and justice.
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (American)
176 pages / 890 Lexile
Description: Firemen burn thought-provoking books in this frightening view of the future. Story of a society in which all books are to
be burned.
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
# pages / # Lexile
Description The setting is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small,
discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering,
and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent - occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as
rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has "rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman's] shrunken life," but even she cannot keep him
from his evening walks. When he stumbles and breaks an ankle (fulfilling one of Coomy's nagging prophecies), she has hardly said "I
told you so" before she is plotting to turn his round-the-clock care over to her younger, sweet-tempered half-sister. Roxana, her
husband, and their two sons live in an already overcrowded apartment, but Coomy knows that Roxana will not refuse her. What
Coomy cannot know is that she has set in motion a great unraveling (and an unexpected repair) of the family - and a revelation of its
deeply love-torn past.
Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (British)
1110 pages / 384 Lexile
Description: Bathsheba Everdene is courted by Gabriel Oak, a young farmer who becomes bailiff of the farm she inherits, by William
Boldwood, who owns the neighboring farm and, by Sergeant Troy, a handsome young adventurer. She marries Troy, who spends
her money freely. Troy now accidentally meets his old love Fanny Robin and her child in pitiful condition on the way to the
workhouse and the next day finds them both dead.
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (American)
336 pages / 730 Lexile
Description: By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of
World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a
beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front.
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual
tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby's household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient
family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved
thief of all arrives-Gentleman, a somewhat elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a
position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud's
vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be left to live out her days in a mental hospital. With dreams of paying
back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for
Maud Lilly in unexpected ways . . . . But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and surprises.
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway (American)
480 pages / 840 Lexile
Description: This masterpiece of time and place tells a profound and timeless story of courage and commitment, love and loss, that
takes place over a fleeting 72 hours. Drawing on Hemingway's own involvement in the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls
reflects his passionate feelings about the nature of war and the meaning of loyalty.
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (British)
208 pages / 1040 Lexile
Description Written in 1816 when she was only 19, in a horror-writing contest suggested by Byron, Mary Shelley's novel of "the
modern Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life created in the laboratory. A frightening creation myth for
our own time, "Frankenstein" remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written, and an undisputed classic.
Free Fall – William Golding (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Sammy Mountjoy voluntarily engages in memory therapy and, by conjuring up fragments of his past, tries to give some
form to his directionless present. In such a purgation, detail is of the utmost importance; no memory is left untouched; no incident
is too irrelevant; smell, moods, colors assume an almost inordinate immediacy when a character is retracing the steps that led to his
spiritual malaise. Sammy is seeking an answer to one burning question: “When did I lose my freedom?’
The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: His first major success, a powerful semi-autobiographical play that explores the fragility of private dreamworlds.
Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin (American)
224 pages / 1030 Lexile
Description: A young black man in Harlem begins to confront the legacy of anger and guilt he has inherited from his family. The story
also explores the ways in which racial oppression has shaped the life of the family and the ways in which they try to use religion to
establish order amid the chaos created by racism and sex. James Baldwin's first major novel is based loosely on his own background.
The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck (Chinese)
260 pages / 1530 Lexile
Description: This great modern classic depicts life in China at a time before the vast political and social upheavals transformed an
essentially agrarian country into a world power. Nobel Prize-winner Pearl S. Buck traces the whole cycle of life--its terrors, its
passions, its ambitions, and rewards.
Goodbye Mr. Chips – James Hilton (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: It deals sentimentally with the life of a popular teacher in an English public school who has been known to several
generations of boys as “Mr. Chips.”
Grapes of Wrath, The – John Steinbeck (American)
586 pages / 680 Lexile
Description: Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment,
exploitation, and hunger.
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
240 pages / 880 Lexile
Green Mansions – W.H. Hudson (William Henry) (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The hero, Mr. Abel, tells the tragic story of his love for the bird girl, Rima, an ethereal maiden whose jungle upbringing
has brought her close to the powers and beauty of nature. Abel has just succeeded in awakening the human emotion of love in the
half-wild girl when she is killed by a band of savages.
Growing Up – Russel Baker (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Russell Baker is the 1979 Pulitzer Prize winner for Distinguished Commentary and a columnist for The New York Times.
This book traces his youth in the mountains of rural Virginia. When Baker was only five, his father died. His mother, strong-willed
and matriarchal, never looked back. After all, she had three children to raise. These were depression years, and Mrs. Baker moved
her fledgling family to Baltimore. Baker's mother was determined her children would succeed, and we know her regimen worked for
Russell. He did everything from delivering papers to hustling subscriptions for the Saturday Evening Post. As is often the case, early
hardships made the man.
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift (British)
320 pages / 1370 Lexile
Description In Swift's bitter, witty satire of the state of England in the early 18th century, his hero, Lemuel Gulliver (the epitome of
the average man), becomes, as he travels, increasingly frustrated by the corruption and irrationality of the human race.
A Handful of Dust – Evely Waugh (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: It describes the infatuation of Lady Brenda Last with an idle, parasitic young man-about-town, John Beaver; which
leads her to neglect her “madly feudal” husband Tony, her son, and her country home of Hetton.
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (Canadian)
320 pages / 750 Lexile
Description A fantasy of future life from the celebrated Canadian novelist. In the Republic of Gilead--formerly the United States--a
fundamentalist regime has reduced women to a state of servitude and suppressed all civil rights. The protagonist, a woman called
Offred, becomes the Handmaid of the Commander, expected to bear him a child in exchange for her freedom. Old enough to
remember life before the revolution, Offred resists the new order and becomes involved in an underground resistance movement.
 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
160 pages / 1050 Lexile
The Heart of Midlothian – Sir Walter Scott (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Effie Deans, the daughter of Scotch cow-feeder affectionately known to his friends as Doucie Davie, is seduced by
George Staunton, son of the rector of Willingham, and is brought to trial and sentenced to death for a child murder. Her loyal and
plucky half-sister, Jeanie Deans, determines to go to London to ask George II for a pardon.
The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Set in West Africa, its hero is Scobie, an English Roman Catholic who is torn between his adulterous love for a young
woman and his duty to his wife and his religion.
Hedda Gabler – Henrick Ibsen (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Dark psychological drama follows its reckless, manipulative heroine to her tragic end.
Hiroshima – John Hersey (American)
152 pages / 1190 Lexile
Description The most famous work of the Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist and reporter. An account of the bombing of Hiroshima in
1945, told from the perspective of six survivors, it is written in a stark, objective voice that manages to be precise and all the more
vivid for its understatement of events. A profoundly influential work that have long since been established as one of the classic
accounts of the Second World War.
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
240 pages / 960 Lexile
Description: In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws
inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the
conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War
II counterpoints the fictional stories of Richard, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother,
and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and
family.
The House of the Scorpion – Nancy Farmer
416 pages / 660 Lexile
Description: Matt's last name is Alacrán, which means that he belongs to a powerful family that controls the drug Farms between
the U.S. and the former Mexico. But Matt's different; he's a clone in a world filled with dangers for his kind. His only protection from
the brutal surroundings are El Patron, the elderly patriarch/drug lord kingpin from which he was made, his caretaker Celia, and a
bodyguard who has been assigned to him. Things fall apart when Matt learns the real reason for his creation and he makes a
harrowing escape to a promising -- yet frighteningly insecure -- world. With all the makings of a modern classic, The House of the
Scorpion is both shocking and intense, particularly because it looks toward an all-too-possible future. Matt is a courageous,
sympathetic character, but his strong-willed fits of anger, which mirror El Patron's, leave a bittersweet taste amid his good
intentions. Another impressive book from Farmer, this novel is true science fiction genius.
House Made of Dawn - Momaday, N. Scott (American)
208 pages / 970 Lexile
Description: In Momaday's first novel, Abel is a Jemez Indian returning to his tribe after World War II. An outsider among his own
people because of his war experiences and because of the fact that he is the illegitimate offspring of a Navajo, Abel is humiliated at a
ceremony, then he murders the man who offended him. After serving an eight-year sentence, Abel moves to Los Angeles, where he
is confronted by the Reverend Tosamah, a Kiowa Indian based on a parodic view of Momaday himself. Tosamah proceeds to
victimize Abel because he is a "longhair"--an unassimilated Indian. Abel is victimized in other ways in Los Angeles, and eventually
returns to the Jemez reservation to bury his grandfather. Through the use of traditions from both Navajo and Jemez cultures, Abel is
finally able to bring together the shards of his identity into a coherent whole.
Howard’s End – E.M. Forster (Edward Morgan) (British)
400 pages / 820 Lexile
Description: On the one hand are the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and their brother Tibby, who care about civilized living,
music, literature, and conversation with their friends; on the other, the Wilcoxes, Henry and his children Charles, Paul, and Evie, who
are concerned with the business side of life and distrust emotions and imagination. Margaret marries Henry Wilcox, to the dismay
of both families, and her love and steadiness of purpose are tested by the resulting strains and misunderstandings. Her marriage
cracks but does not break. In the end, torn between her sister and her husband, she succeeds in bridging the mistrust that divides
them.
In America – Susan Sontag (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: In America is a big, juicy, surprising book-about a woman's search for self-transformation, about the fate of idealism,
about the world of the theater-that will captivate its readers from the first page. It is Sontag's most delicious, most brilliant
achievement.
Interpreter of the Maladies – Jhumpa Lahiri (Indian)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: With accomplished precision and gentle eloquence, Lahiri traces the crosscurrents set in motion when immigrants,
expatriates, and their children arrive, quite literally, at a cultural divide. A blackout forces a young Indian American couple to make
confessions that unravel their tattered domestic peace. An Indian American girl recognizes her cultural identity during a Halloween
celebration while the Pakistani civil war rages on television in the background. A latchkey kid with a single working mother finds
affinity with a woman from Calcutta who, among other things, is struggling to learn to drive. In the title story, an interpreter guides
an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Imbued with the sensual details of
Indian culture, these stories speak with passion and wisdom to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of
the title story, Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and a baffling new world. Interpreter of Maladies
introduces "a wonderful new voice in American fiction. Jhumpa Lahiri is a sensitive chronicler of the immigrant experience.
Interpreter of Maladies is a wise and sophisticated collection"
The Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison (American)
608 pages / 950 Lexile
Description: Compelling story of an anonymous black man who experiences a variety of adventures in the South and later in New
York City during a fervent quest for personal identity and social visibility.
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
512 pages / 1410 Lexile
Description: A tale of the period following the Norman Conquest. The titular hero is Wilfred, knight of Ivanhoe, the son of Cedric
the Saxon, in love with his father’s ward Rowena. Cedric, however, wishes her to marry Athelstane who is descended from the
Saxon royal line and may restore the Saxon supremacy. Richard I in the guise of the Black Knight and Robin Hood as Locksley play
prominent roles, and knights and palmers from the Holy Land, fair ladies, conspiracies and counterattacks, a tournament and the
burning of a great castle combine to give it a rich and varied color.
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (British)
240 pages / 780 Lexile
Description Charlotte Brontë's first novel, based in part on the author's own days in a brutal boarding school, tells the story of a
spirited governess and her employer--the Byronic, brooding Mr. Rochester. This story of a plain, impoverished young woman who
defies male expectations and the social conventions to become a strong and fulfilled adult has become an enduring classic.
Jasmine - Bharati Mukherjee (Indian)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village
where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more
life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, happily pregnant by a middle-aged Iowa banker and the
adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps,
illuminates the making of an American mind; but even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being
transformed by her and others like her - our new neighbors, friends, and lovers. In Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee has created a heroine
as exotic and unexpected as the many worlds in which she lives.
Jazz – Toni Morrison (American)
240 pages / 980 Lexile
Description: In the afterglow of her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Beloved, Morrison moves to even higher ground--the story of
Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman in his 50s, his mentally unstable wife, and his 18-year-old lover. Set in Harlem in the 1920s, the
story captures the rhythms of the city and the bittersweet mood of African American life at a moment in our history we assumed we
understood.
Joseph Andrews – Henry Fielding (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A comic romance that begins as a parody of Richardson’s Pamela, with Joseph as Pamela’s brother and Mr. B.
appearing as young Booby. Joseph is a footman who marries a maidservant. His adventures with the high-born Lady Booby are
modeled after those of Pamela and Mr. B., and, like Pamela, Joseph remains virtuous.
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan (Chinese)
352 pages / 930 Lexile
Description: In 1949, four Chinese women--drawn together by the shadow of their past--begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah
jong, invest in stocks and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club--and forge a relationship that binds them for more
than three decades.
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy (British)
512 pages / 1060 Lexile
Description "Jude the Obscure" is perhaps the most vivid illustration of Hardy's belief that our lives are governed by dark and
malevolent forces. Jude Fawley is torn between his sensual nature and his equally strong lust for learning, two sides of his character
that are personified by the two women in his life--the earthy Arabella and the intellectual Sue Bridehead. Jude comes to a tragic end
because of his inability to reconcile them. His attempts to rise above his humble origins, in spite of all his efforts, prove impossible,
as do his attempts to live an unconventional life outside of marriage with the woman he loves. The novel represents Hardy's
strongest attack on the insularity of English university life, and on marriage as a religious institution.
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
408 pages / 1170 Lexile
Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson (British)
352 pages / 990 Lexile
Description: Adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751. He was kidnapped and cast away, suffered on a desert isle, journeyed in
the wild highlands, and made acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites.
King Lear – William Shakespeare (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description King Lear foolishly disinherits his loving and dutiful youngest daughter, only to realize he made a grave error in dividing
his kingdom between the elder two.
Kim – Rudyard Kipling (British)
288 pages / 940 Lexile
Description: The Irish boy hero, Kimball O’Hara better known as Kim, is an orphan, shifting for himself in Lahore. He attaches
himself to a holy man, an old lama from Tibet who is on a quest for the mystic River of the Arrows, and together the pair roams
about India.
Last Days of Pompeii – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The hero, Glaucus, is a noble young Athenian, in love with the beautiful Ione. Her guardian Arbaces, a priest of Isis and
the villain of the story, makes every effort to thwart the romance and win Ione for his own evil ends.
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (French)
416 pages / 990 Lexile
Description Hugo's wrenching story centers on Jean Valjean, an honest peasant sentenced to five years' hard labor for stealing a loaf
of bread, then 19 more for trying to escape. Turned into a hardened and ruthless criminal by his experiences, he reforms, becomes
mayor of a French town, but is tracked down by the pitiless detective Javert for another obscure crime, and incarcerated. Escaping
again from the brutal French prison, he befriends a prostitute named Fantine and her daughter, Cosette. This 1862 novel is
remarkable for its sympathetic portrayal of common people: prisoners, the poor, women of the streets--all the down-and-out
victims of the gross inequities of class in 19th-century Europe.
Lesson Before Dying, A – Ernest J. Gaines (American)
272 pages / 750 Lexile
Description: Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s, "A Lesson Before Dying" is an "enormously moving" ("Los Angeles
Times") novel of one man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit and a young man who visits him in his cell. In the end,
the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting--and defying--the expected. Winner of
the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
336 pages / 830 Lexile
Description: Meet Pi Patel, a young man on the cusp of adulthood when fate steps in and hastens his lessons in maturity. En route
with his family from their home in India to Canada, their cargo ship sinks, and Pi finds himself adrift in a lifeboat -- alone, save for a
few surviving animals, some of the very same animals Pi's zookeeper father warned him would tear him to pieces if they got a
chance. But Pi's seafaring journey is about much more than a struggle for survival. It becomes a test of everything he's learned -about both man and beast, their creator, and the nature of truth itself. With a brilliant combination of sensitivity and a precise
economy of language, Martel develops a story some readers might find less than credible. But his capacity for the mysterious, and a
true understanding of the depths of human resilience will compel even the most skeptical of readers to continue on the fantastic
journey with Pi, and an unusual 450-pound Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Light in August – William Faulkner (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: LIGHT IN AUGUST is the compelling story of Joe Christmas, an orphan of unknown ancestry who believes himself to be
part-black. Like so many of Faulkner's novels, this one deals with the importance of community, as well as the roles of race and
gender in Southern life.
The Light That Failed – Rudyard Kipling (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Through his experience as an illustrator in the Sudan, the hero, Dick Heldar, wins both professional success and a firm
friend in the war correspondent Torpenhow. He is in love with his foster sister Maisie, now also an artist, but Maisie is shallow and
selfish and does not appreciate his devotion.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Alan Sillitoe (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A first-person portrait of a rebellious and anarchic Borstal boy who refuses both literally and metaphorically to play the
games of the establishment.
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
352 pages / 1120 Lexile
Lost Horizon – James Hilton (British)
240 pages / 1060 Lexile
Description: Hugh Conway is a British consul at Baskul when trouble erupts in 1931 and all civilians are evacuated. He and three
others board a plane lent by a Maharajah. After they are airborne for several hours, they realize that they are headed in the wrong
direction. When the pilot finally lands, the passengers find themselves in Shangri-la, a utopian lamasery whose inhabitants know the
secret of attaining long life. Believing that war is going to destroy all civilization, the High Lama summons the newcomers to form
the nucleus of a new civilization.
Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich
384 pages / 780 Lexile
Description: The first book in Erdrich's Native American tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace is an
authentic and emotionally powerful glimpse into the Native American experience--now resequenced and expanded to include
never-before-published chapters.
M. Butterfly – David Henry Hwang
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Inspired by an actual espionage scandal, a French diplomat discovers the startling truth about his Chinese mistress. This
sweeping drama exposes Western fantasies of Asia that led to the debacle of Vietnam.
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
400 pages / 1030 Lexile
Description Flaubert's portrait of an adulteress who seeks freedom from a prosaic, disappointing life and ultimately is destroyed by
her selfishness was considered scandalous when it was published. Flaubert chose his subject to illustrate his belief that any aspect of
life, however trivial or vulgar, could be a subject for literature, and could be raised to the status of art by the quality of the writing.
The Magus – John Robert Fowles (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A novel set largely on the Greek island of Phraxos, where British schoolmaster Nicholas D’Urfe, half guest and half
victim, is subjected to a series of mysterious apparitions and tableaux which, despite their naturalistic explanations, give the novel a
narrative complexity and mythological dimension.
Major Barbara – George Bernard Shaw (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Barbara, the granddaughter of an earl, is busy saving souls in the Salvation Army while her father, maintaining that
poverty is the worst of crimes, runs a munitions factory.
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Because of his love for Mary Graham, the so-called hero is forced by his old grandfather to leave home and emigrate to
America. He has some sadly disillusioning experiences with real estate in an over-advertised swamp named Eden, and returns to
England with little lover for anything American.
Mayor of Casterbridge, The – Thomas Hardy (British)
384 pages / 1090 Lexile
Description: The story of Michael Henchard who, in a moment of drunken despair, sells his wife at an auction and later in life regrets
the act.
Medea – Euripides (Continental European)
260 pages / 1000 Lexile
Description: Deserted by Jason, whose life she saved at a great cost to herself and others, and forced into exile by the father of her
rival in love, Medea plots a barbaric revenge. The consequences wrought by her destructive actions, and by those who
underestimate her bewitching power, are harrowing.
Member of the Wedding , The – Carson McCullers (American)
160 pages / 900 Lexile
Description: Twelve-year-old Frankie cannot understand why everyone disapproves of her idea of going on her brother's
honeymoon.
Middlemarch – George Eliot (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: With sure and subtle touch, Eliot paints a luminous and spacious landscape of life in a provincial town, interweaving her
themes with a proliferation of characters: an innocent idealist; a self-defeated young doctor; a naive young woman; and a cold man,
who "lives too much with the dead".
Mill on the Floss, The – George Eliot (British)
560 pages / 1240 Lexile
Description: Maggie Tulliver, the heroine who has aspirations beyond her sex and station has atoned for her sin and, finally, dies
trying to save the brother whose love she could not win.
Misanthrope, The – Moliere (French)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Moliere's "The Misanthrope" is the most humorous play written in any language. It centers around the character
Alceste, who has a firm belief in being brutally honest all the time. The habit of others to speak harshly behind other's backs and
hypocritically praise them to their faces drives him to the brink of insanity. It irks him so much that his only wish would be to become
a hermit in the mountains. If it weren't for his love of the beautiful Celimene. However, to make things more complicated, she
happens to be the queen of duplicitous thought. Alceste hates himself for loving a woman who behaves in the manner that irritates
him the most, but cannot bring himself to confront what troubles him. That, paired with the remarkably written exchanges between
Alceste, his friend Philinte, the pompous Oronte, and the many social courtiers and French aristocracy make this the ideal story to
bring you to tears with laughter.
Moby Dick – Herman Melville (American)
Lexile
687 pages / 1200
Description: Melville tells the dual story of the initiation of young Ishmael, a schoolteacher, into the life of a seaman, and the
tragedy of Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale. Another exploration of Melville's perennial themes of good vs. evil and
the fundamental isolation of the human condition, MOBY-DICK is a layered, complex, allusive book that is part rip-roaring adventure
tale, part quest, part travel chronicle, part picaresque coming-of-age novel. At the end of the wrenching narrative, Captain Ahab is
killed in his mad attempt to defeat the whale, his ship destroyed, and all hands lost but young Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale that
would make Melville's reputation as one of the greatest American writers.
The Moon and Sixpence – William Somerset Maugham (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: It tells of Charles Strickland, a conventional London stock broker, who in middle life becomes interested in painting,
changes completely in character, and deserts his wife, family, and business in order to live and paint in Tahiti, where he takes a
native mistress.
Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe (British)
364 pages / 1390 Lexile
Description Defoe's 1722 novel about a spirited and oddly appealing ex-prostitute and thief, now reformed, is not only a disturbingly
realistic look at London's underworld, but one of the first works of fiction to explore the interior consciousness of its main character.
Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Under the guise of a detective novel, Lethem has written a more piercing tale of investigation, one revealing how the
mind drives on its own "wheels within wheels."
Mrs. Dalloway – Viginia Woolf (British)
216 pages / 950 Lexile
Description: Clarissa Dalloway, in her fifties, wife of an English MP, emerges from her house in Westminster one fine June morning
to buy flowers for her party. And by that simple act she entwines her life with the lives of others who will hear, with her, Big Ben toll
away the hours of their destinies that day.
Mrs. Warren’s Profession – George Bernard Shaw (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Modern parallels abound in the plight of Cambridge educated mathematics whiz Vivie Warren, who discovers that her
comfortable upbringing was financed in unspeakable ways. Shaw pits his clever heroine against a memorable gallery of rouges in this
superbly intelligent & still-shocking comedy.
Murder in the Cathedral – T.S. Eliot (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Eliot's most famous play, a poetic religious drama based on the murder of Thomas à Becket, was commissioned for the
1935 Canterbury Festival. It used ritualistic devices to dramatize the murder, among them a chorus and a long set-piece sermon
delivered by Becket at the climax of the play.
Native Son – Richard Wright (American)
528 pages / 700 Lexile
Description: Bigger Thomas, a young black man in Chicago, murders two women and is condemned to death. Bigger, whose crimes
escalate as the story takes its sad and terrible course, feels that the act of murder is a kind of existential act, and is the only kind of
freedom he has ever known. Wright deliberately avoided making his protagonist a sympathetic character, wishing to accurately
depict the dehumanization of blacks in American society, as well as his belief that Bigger, as a product of his environment, is not
truly guilty of the murders he committed.
Native Speaker – Chang-Rae Lee (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Henry Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American--a native speaker. But even as the essence of his
adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage and language seem to drift further and further away, and Henry fears
that in becoming a man of two worlds, he has betrayed both--and belongs to neither.
No-No Boy – John Okada
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A searing novel of Japanese-American internment. When the U.S. government began incarcerating its own JapaneseAmerican citizens during World War II, it asked them two questions: 1) Would they swear unqualified allegiance to the U.S. and
defend it from foreign attack, and 2) Would they serve in the U.S. armed forces? Men who answered "yes - yes" went to fight in
special all-Japanese American squads created by FDR. Men who answered "no - no" were branded disloyal and sent to camp. To say
"No," i.e., to deny the validity of the question altogether, was not an option. Okada's searing book tells the story of one young man
whose strongest assertion of himself was a negation of the impossible circumstances he faced.
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: NORTHANGER ABBEY is about a naive young woman whose head is full of the Gothic novels she consumes, and who
begins to imagine that life may well be even stranger than fiction. Catherine Morland makes a touching, if somewhat charmingly
brainless, heroine; Henry Tilney is a self-possessed and witty hero; and the plot device in which Catherine sees General Tilney as a
black-hearted villain out of a Gothic romance is ingenious and engrossing. In fact, this early work is full of sustained and sparkling
inventiveness, and exhibits the sharp and accurate social observations of Austen's more mature fiction.
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: In an imaginary South American country, Costaguana, Charles Gould runs a silver
Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: This novel’s hero is Philip Carey, a sensitive, talented, club-footed orphan who is brought up by an unsympathetic aunt
and uncle. It is a study of his struggle for independence, his intellectual development, and his attempt to become an artist. Philip
gets entangled and obsessed by his love affair with Mildred, a waitress. After years of struggle as a medical student, he marries a
nice woman, gives up his aspirations, and becomes a country doctor.
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description Steinbeck tells of two ranch hands who drift from job to job, always one step ahead of the law and a few dollars from
the poorhouse.
Obasan – Joy Kogawa (Japanese)
320 pages / 990 Lexile
Description: In this beautifully written novel, Kogawa takes on alienation, identity and memory in the touching story of a JapaneseCanadian family living through and beyond World War II's discrimination. When her great-aunt Obasan's husband dies, main
character Naomi returns to the home of her childhood to sort through belongings and take care of details. As other members of her
now-fragmented family gather at the house, old memories resurface and bring Naomi into crisis. As she recalls the luxuriant home of
her early childhood, the hardship and enforced moves of World War II, and the desolate, dusty town where her family ended up,
Naomi is forced to confront her past and look closely at her present. There are discoveries, too, to be made, about her once-strong
Obasan, her distant brother Stephen, her long-missing mother and the meaning of love, family and culture.
Old Man and the Sea, The – Ernest Hemingway (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: In language of great simplicity and power, Hemingway tells the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and
his supreme ordeal--a relentless, agonizing battle with a marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA, considered
one of Hemingway's best novels, is a stark portrait of endurance, and the old man is one of his most fully realized characters.
Optimist’s Daughter, The – Eudora Welty (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: This story of jealousy and ambition begins when Laurel Hand, a Chicago widow, goes home to Mississippi to visit her
sick father. Once there, she discovers that her father is now married to Fay, a woman younger than herself. Laurel, quiet and
demure, and the crass Fay take an immediate dislike to each other, and their personality clashes are heightened by their
competition for the Judge's affections and estate.
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel – George Meredith (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Sir Austin Feverel’s wife has run off with a poet, leaving him with their son Richard. Sir Austin, arrogant and ignorant,
devises a “System” for Richard’s education, which consists in keeping the boy at home (for schools are corrupting) and in trusting to
authoritarian parental vigilance.
Othello – William Shakespeare (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description This is the classic, broody story of Othello, a black general in the army, who loves the beautiful Desdemona.
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: John Harmon, presumed dead, returns to claim his inheritance--and also to claim Bella Wilfer, the woman his father's
will stipulates he must marry. Wishing to discover Bella's true character, he hides his identity and becomes the secretary to the
amiable Boffins, who were second in line to inherit the estate. Mr. Boffin, by a series of machinations, ensures that Bella appreciates
the worth of the "penniless" Harmon--whose real identity is of course revealed in the end, to the joy of the honest Boffins, who
refuse to succumb to the crass materialism displayed by most of the other characters. A scathing critique of the skewed values of
mid-Victorian society, "Our Mutual Friend" is one of Dickens's most powerful, humorous, and appealing novels.
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: In Roddy Doyle's novel witty and poignant novel of working-class life in Dublin, 10-year-old Paddy copes with his
parents' fights, his earthy neighborhood, and the trials of his little brother Sinbad. PADDY CLARKE HA HA HA was the winner of the
Booker Prize in 1993.
Paradise – Toni Morrison (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Morrison's novel--her first since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993--is extraordinary for its
breathtaking drive, stylistic panache, and enlivening moral gravitas. Spanning the time from the Reconstruction to the 1970s, this
powerful work deftly manipulates past, present, and future as it reveals the interior lives of the citizens of a fictional, all-black town
called Paradise.
Passage to India, A – E.M. Forster (British)
368 pages / 950 Lexile
Description: In Forster's beautifully written novel about British India at the turn of the century, a simple misunderstanding erupts
into hostility. The plot centers on Aziz, a young doctor who is initially tolerant of the British presence in India. However, when he
takes a group of Americans to the Caves of Marabar and an American woman accuses him of raping her, his attitude changes.
Imprisoned and then released when the woman recants, Aziz becomes thoroughly disillusioned and a proponent of a Hindi-Muslim
alliance against the British.
Phaèdre –Jean Racine (French)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A lean, high-tension version of a classic tragedy. The myth of Phaedra is one of the most powerful in all of classical
mythology. As dramatized by the French playwright Jean Racine (1639-99), the dying Queen's obsessive love for her stepson,
Hippolytus, and the scrupulously upright Hippolytus' love for the forbidden beauty Aricia has come to be known as one of the great
stories of tragic infatuation, a tale of love strong enough to bring down a kingdom.
Piano Lesson, The – August Wilson (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Set in 1936, The Piano Lesson is a powerful new play from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences and Ma Rainey's
Black Bottom. A sister and brother fight over a piano that has been in the family for three generations, creating a remarkable drama
that embodies the painful past and expectant future of black Americans.
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov (Russian/American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: PNIN was the last novel Nabokov wrote in America, in 1957 when he was teaching at Cornell. It is the story of a drab,
gentle, lovable failure: Timofey Pnin, an émigré Russian teacher at a mediocre upstate New York college who fails to get tenure and
ultimately loses his job. Pnin's history amusingly resembles what Nabokov's might have been had he been less brilliant and
ambitious.
Point counter Point – Aldous Huxley (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Presents a picture of the lives of British upper-class society and London intellectuals during the 1920’s. Frequent
allusions to literature, painting, music, and contemporary British politics occur throughout the book, and much scientific information
is embodied in its background.
Portrait of a Lady, The – Henry James (American)
656 pages / 940 Lexile
Description: An American heiress newly arrived in Europe, Isabel does not look to a man to furnish her with her destiny; instead she
desires, with grace and courage, to find it herself. Two eligible suitors approach her and are refused. She then becomes utterly
captivated by the languid charms of Gilbert Osmond. To him, she represents a superior prize worth at least 70 thousand pounds;
through him, she faces a tragic choice.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A – James Joyce (British)
288 pages / 1120 Lexile
Description: Joyce's bildüngsroman--his first novel--traces the development of Stephen Daedalus, Joyce's alter ego. In order to
pursue his artistic calling, Stephen, like Joyce, must reject his family, religion, and native land. At the end of the novel, Stephen is
about to forsake Dublin for Paris. Joyce, in PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, was an early practitioner of the stream-of-consciousness
technique, by means of which Stephen's interior life and growing self-awareness are rendered directly, so that the reader has access
not only to his conscious thoughts but to his unconscious as well.
Possession – A.S. Byatt (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic
when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by
the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun
to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of
literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a
clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales,
extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Set in Mexico, this novel describes the desperate last wanderings of a whisky priest as outlaw in his own state, who,
despite a sense of his own worthlessness (he drinks, and has fathered a bastard daughter), is determined to continue to function as
a priest until captured.
Praisesong for the Widdow – Paule Marshall (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Avatar (Avey) Johnson is a West Indian-American widow in her 60s. Affluent, secure, she has lost touch with her
Caribbean origins. After her husband dies, however, Avey goes on a West Indian cruise and begins having anxious dreams about a
great-great-aunt. She makes plans to escape her anxiety by returning to New York City; while waiting for her flight, she relives
memories of her marriage and how distanced she and her husband had both grown even from their own private ceremonies and
gestures. The following day, Avey travels to another island where she participates in an ancestral celebration, and begins a spiritual
transformation.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
480 pages / 1060 Lexile
Pudd’nhead Wilson – Mark Twain (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description Mark Twain's classic satirical tale of race and identity. Roxana, a light-skinned slave nurse on a large Southern
plantation, is desperate to give her son a better chance at life than she had ever enjoyed, and so she switches him with the master's
son. Years later, when Roxana's real son has turned to gambling, murder, and theft, it is the country lawyer, Pudd'nhead Wilson,
who unmasks the true identity of the two.
Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Brilliantly written play, with its theme of the emerging butterfly, is one of the most acclaimed comedies in the English
language.
Rabbit, Run – John Updike (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description The highly acclaimed saga of desire and regret, first published in 1959. Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is typically Middle
American--a small-town Protestant, a former basketball star, a married man intent on making a name for himself in the community-whose life begins to unravel when he falls in love and deserts his wife. Caught between his sense of duty and his intimations of life's
real depth, he is unable to commit himself to one or the other.
The Rainbow – D.H. Lawrence (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: This multi-generational novel deals with the strong, vital, passionate Brangwen family, farmers and craftsmen of
Nottinghamshire.
Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The award-winning, now classic drama about a working-class African-American family on the South Side of Chicago-their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations.
Rapture of Canaan, The – Sheri Reynolds (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: From the author of Bitterroot Landing--hailed by the Richmond State as "a splendid contribution to Southern
literature"--comes a stunning story woven around the themes of innocence and miracles in everyday life. When the granddaughter
of the founder of an isolated religious community in South Carolina is discovered to be pregnant, no amount of punishment will
make her recant her statement that a holy child grows inside her.
The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Character study of a young American, a flyer in World War I, who returns to his home in Chicago in 1010, vaguely
conscious that he is missing something. To the horror of the girl who wants to marry him, he will not take a job; he wants to
“loaf.” He foes to Paris and then to India in search of his ideal, and finds a certain measure of personal peace, but succeeds in
making life even more difficult for those who have tried to make him lead a conventional life.
Reivers, The – William Faulkner (American)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Faulkner's great comic novel moves on the wheels of breathless suspense. Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, & Ned
McCaslin "borrow" Lucius grandfather's automobile at the beginning of a hilarious journey that pales in comparison to what awaits
the reivers (plunderers or freebooters) in Memphis. Ned trades the auto for a most dubious racehorse. How the reivers grapple with
the crisis is the mainspring of the story which leads from a brothel to a brush with the law to the most bizarre horse racing in fact or
fiction! The wild humor & the frenetic action will not, however, obscure to the listener that The Reivers, like all of Faulkner's work, is
about moving & tender human relationships & moral insights into human conduct
Remains of the Day, The - Kazo Ishiguro
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Ishiguro's subtly observed novel tells the story of a butler who has outlived his usefulness, and whose obtuseness has
blinded him not only to the real nature of his employer but to the workings of his own heart.
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The sole survivor on a doomed ship spends twenty-four years on an uninhabited tropical island.
Room with a View, A – E.M. Forster (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Forster's skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of
foreign cultures, as he portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy. One of Forster's earliest and most
celebrated works.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: This is a most remarkable and thrilling play. In one bound Mr. Stoppard is asking to be considered as among the finest
English-speaking writers of our stage, for this is a work of fascinating distinction....Very funny, very brilliant, very chilling; it has the
dust of thought about it and the particles glitter excitingly in the theatrical air. Mr. Stoppard is not only paraphrasing Hamlet, but
also throwing in a paraphrase of Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' for good measure
Saint Joan – George Bernard Shaw (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: A naive country maid from Domremy obeys voices from God & charms her way to the head of the French army & the
coronation of the Dauphin. Her simplicity confounds a world unready to accept her & is condemned for heresy.
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Banned in India before publication, this immense novel by Booker Prize-winner Rushdie (Midnight's Children) pits Good
against Evil in a whimsical and fantastic tale. Two actors from India, ``prancing'' Gibreel Farishta and ``buttony, pursed'' Saladin
Chamcha, are flying across the English Channel when the first of many implausible events occurs: the jet explodes. As the two men
plummet to the earth, ``like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar,'' they argue, sing and are transformed. When they are found
on an English beach, the only survivors of the blast, Gibreel has sprouted a halo while Saladin has developed hooves, hairy legs and
the beginnings of what seem like horns. What follows is a series of allegorical tales that challenges assumptions about both human
and divine nature. Rushdie's fanciful language is as concentrated and overwhelming as a paisley pattern. Angels are demonic and
demons are angelic as we are propelled through one illuminating episode after another.
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The Dashwood sisters are very different from each other in appearance and temperament; Elinor's good sense and
readiness to observe social forms contrast with Marianne's impulsive candor and warm but excessive sensibility. Both struggle to
maintain their integrity and find happiness in the face of a competitive marriage market.
The Shipping News – Anne Proulx
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The protagonist of this novel is a journalist whose wife has been killed with a lover in an automobile accident, leaving
him with two small daughters. Quoyle is "the son of immigrant parents from Newfoundland. . . . An aunt appears, . . . proposing that
she, Quoyle, and the girls . . . return to the old family base and make —or try to make — a living on Quoyle's Point, Capsize Cove,
about two miles across the water from Killick-Claw (population 2,000), where the weekly paper needs somebody to cover shipping
news. . . . Quoyle surprises himself by doing well at the Gammy Bird. As he learns the local ropes, . . . he learns things he never
suspected about his forebears."
Shirley – Charlotte Bronte (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The scene of the story is Yorkshire, and the period the latter part of the Napoleonic wars, when the wool industry was
suffering from the almost complete cessation of exports. In spite of these conditions, Robert Gerard Moore persists in introducing
the latest labor-saving machinery, undeterred by the opposition of the workers, which culminates in an attempt first to destroy his
mill, and finally to take his life. To overcome his financial difficulties, he proposes to Shirley Keeldar, and heiress of independent
spirit, while under the mistaken impression that she is in love with him, he himself loves not her, but his gentle and retiring cousin
Caroline Helstone.
Silas Marner – George Eliot (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description Falsely accused and embittered, Silas Marner becomes a miser alienated from humanity and who loves only his hoard of
money, until a child comes to him for shelter and redeems him through the power of love. This tale of simple people in small-town
England has the unwarranted reputation of being moralistic and saccharine; it is, in fact, one of George Eliot's most comic, balanced,
and moving works of fiction.
Snow Falling on Cedars – David Guterson (American)
480 pages / 1080 Lexile
Description: Set on San Piedro, an isolated & ruggedly beautiful island in Puget Sound, where, in 1954, a Japanese-American
fisherman is charged with murder. Around his trial, David Guterson composes a haunting fugue of memory, guilt, & longing, whose
themes include the childhood romance between a white boy & a Japanese girl, a simmering land dispute, & the wartime internment
of San Piedro's Japanese residents
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (American)
392 pages / 870 Lexile
Description: In Toni Morrison's powerful 1977 novel, Milkman Dead hears a strange story: his father and his aunt Pilate witnessed
their father's murder, and Pilate has carried his bones around with her for 20 years. Milkman travels south to find that this
grandfather (who fled slavery and escaped, creating a myth of flight) has been immortalized in folktales and songs. He and Pilate
bury his bones at last; Pilate is killed; and Milkman is made free and powerful by his newfound connection to his ancestors. Winner
of the 1978 National Book Critics Award.
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: SONS AND LOVERS (1913) tells the story of young Paul Morel, son of the troubled union of an educated, upwardly
mobile mother and an unlettered coal miner father. Although in later life Lawrence regretted his brutal portrait of his father, the
hero of his novel is most definitely his mother's boy who becomes increasingly dissatisfied with his mean, impoverished home in a
Nottinghamshire coal town. He is drawn to a young woman named Miriam, with whom he reads poetry and speaks French; his
mother fears Paul's attraction to Miriam will jeopardize her own relationship with him, and she succeeds in coming between them.
Paul then begins an affair with Clara, a married woman and a feminist. When Paul's mother becomes fatally ill and dies, Paul rejects
his background for good, resolves to forget both Miriam and Clara, and sets out with renewed resolution on a quest for a life of his
own.
The Sound and the Fury, The – William Faulkner (American)
427 pages / 870 Lexile
Description: THE SOUND AND THE FURY, Faulkner's fourth novel, is his first true masterpiece, and many consider it to be his finest
work. It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his "most splendid failure." Depicting the decline of the
once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator.
South Wind – Norman Douglas (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: Bishop Heard, who serves as an observer and interpreter of the people and their problems, goes to Nepenthe to meet
his cousin, Mrs. Meadows, to escort her and her child to England. The bishop was introduced to Nepenthe society by Don
Francesco, a priest he has met on the boat. One of the few Englishwomen on the island was Miss Wilberforce, who frequently drank
to excess and undressed in the streets at odd times of the day and night. Fortunately, the bishop had developed a tolerant point of
view while living among African natives, and he was able to accept these strange characters as he found them.
The Spire – William Golding (British)
# pages / # Lexile
Description: The story of Jocelin, Dean of the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, who is obsessed with the vision of capping his church
with a spire. His master builder warns him that the foundations cannot support the weight, but Jocelin pays no attention and
proceeds with a plan that brings death, madness, but an eventual triumph.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold – John Le Carre (British)
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Description: The story of Alec Leamas, 50-year old professional (secret agent) who has grown stale in espionage, who longs to
“come in from the cold” – and how he undertakes one last assignment before that hoped-for retirement. Over the years Leamas has
grown unsure where his workday self ends and his real self begins.
Stone Angel – Carol O’Connell (American)
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Description NYPD sergeant Kathleen Mallory travels to the Louisiana town where her mother was stoned to death 17 years earlier to
try and uncover the circumstances surrounding that vicious attack.
The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields (American)
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Description: The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled
decades of our century. Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage,
motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story
within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.
Streetcar Named Desire, A – Tennessee Williams (American)
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Description: Blanche DuBois, a fading Southern belle, arrives to see her sister Stella in New Orleans. An alcoholic, clinging to the
Southern tradition, she criticizes Stella for losing the family home to marry the rugged and crude Stanley Kowalski. Blanche lives in
her own grieving, half-mad fantasy world; this ires Stanley, who ruins her relationship with another man, rapes her, and further
accelerates her descent into madness.
Sula – Toni Morrison (American)
192 pages / 1050 Lexile
Description: Written by one of the most important novelists in America today, Sula is a rich and moving novel that traces the lives of
two black heroines--from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, through their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to
their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
Sun Also Rises, The – Ernest Hemingway (American)
256 pages / 610 Lexile
Description: Hemingway's first bestselling novel, the story of a group of Americans and English on a sojourn from Paris to Paloma,
evokes in poignant detail, life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s and conveys in brutally realistic
descriptions the power and danger of bullfighting in Spain.
Tale of Two Cities, A – Charles Dickens (British)
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Description: The timeless classic of love and sacrifice during the French Revolution! With insight and compassion, Dickens casts his
tale with such memorable characters as the evil Madame Defarge and her knitted patterns of death, the gentle Lucie Manette and
her unfailing devotion to her downtrodden father, and the courageous Sydney Carton, who would give his own love--and life--for a
woman that would never be his.
Taming of the Shrew, The – William Shakespeare (British)
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Description: In a battle between the sexes, Shakespeare has created a farce filled with practical jokes and sight gags which add fun
to the story of how Petruchio tries to win over Katherina.
Tess of the D’Urbevilles – Thomas Hardy
456 pages / 1110 Lexile
Description: The tragic history of a woman betrayed. . . Tess, the author contends, is sinned against, but not a sinner; her tragedy is
the work of tyrannical circumstances and of the evil deeds of others in the past and the present, and more particularly of two men’s
baseness, the seducer and the well-meaning intellectual who married her.
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
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Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (African)
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Description: The bestselling novel of history and change in modern Africa. Obi Okonkwo is a young African Christian living in a
missionary town in Nigeria. His religion sets him at odds with many of his relatives, and tribal warriors in the region try to stir up
resentment of the "foreigners" who preach the European religion. At the same time, Okonkwo feels ill at ease with many of the
missionaries. First published in 1959, "Things Fall Apart" is an incisive portrait of the division within the modern African psyche.
A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley (American)
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Description: The author of The Age of Grief and Ordinary Love and Good Will has written a breakthrough novel--winner of the
Pulitzer Prize in fiction. When an Iowa patriarch decides to turn over his thriving farm to his three daughters, he sets off a series of
tragic events that will eventually rip apart his family.
Three Junes – Julia Glass (British)
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Description: This artfully constructed debut novel is told in three parts, each set in the month of June. As she tells the tales of love,
loss, and the bonds between members of a complicated Scottish family, Julia Glass poignantly explores the role of fate and
serendipity in bringing people together, as well as the communication gaps and shuttered emotions that often keep them apart.
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (British)
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Description: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE is a beautifully written novel in which Woolf fleshes out her notions of reality by using a three-part
structure and an elegiac, ode-like form to reveal the complexities of family politics. The autobiographical storyline follows Mr. and
Mrs. Ramsay, their children, an eccentric artist, and a family friend over the course of many years.
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding (British)
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Description: A milestone in the history of the English novel, Tom Jones draws readers into a world teeming with memorable
characters. This epic of everyday life chronicles the adventures of Tom Jones, who was abandoned as an infant and grows into a
lusty, imprudent young man. Promising to mend his ways, Tom competes with an abusive rival for the affections of a wealthy
squire's daughter, and learns the truth about his identity, in this discerning comedy of human foibles and self-discovery.
Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain (American)
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Description: In this classic coming-of-age tale, the hero is not the maverick iconoclast that Huck Finn is; his comic battles with prim
conformity are essentially harmless. In "Tom Sawyer", Twain effectively and lovingly recreates the pastoral world of his Hannibal,
Missouri childhood.
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson (British)
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Description: Young Jim Hawkins discovers a treasure map in the chest of an old sailor who dies under mysterious circumstances at
his mother’s inn. He shows it to Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney who agree to outfit a ship and sail to Treasure Island. Among the
new crew is the pirate Long John Silver and his followers who are in pursuit of the treasure.
Turn of the Screw, The – Henry James
72 pages / 520 Lexile
Description An innocent, impressionable young governess takes over the education of two delightful children, Flora and Miles, at an
isolated country estate. She becomes convinced that the children's former governess and a valet once employed on the estate--both
now dead--have returned and are trying to gain control of the children's souls. Her hysteria builds to a terrifying and tragic climax.
James's novella demonstrates the idea that the horrors concocted by the imagination are far worse than reality.
Twelfth Night – William Shakespeare (British)
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Description: Set in a topsy-turvy world like a holiday revel, this comedy devises a romantic plot around separated twins, misplaced
passions, and mistaken identity. Juxtaposed to it is the satirical story of a self-deluded steward who dreams of becoming "Count
Malvolio" only to receive his comeuppance at the hands of the merrymakers he wishes to suppress. The two plots combine to create
a farce touched with melancholy, mixed throughout with seductively beautiful explorations on the themes of love and time, and the
play ends, not with laughter, but with a clown's sad song.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beacher Stowe (American)
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Description: This 1852 novel provides a powerful, historical look at the treatment of slaves in the pre-Civil War South.
Unvanquished, The – William Faulkner (American)
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Description: The Sartoris family, who embody the antebellum ideal of Southern honor and its transformation through war, defeat,
and Reconstruction, are the focal point of this outstanding novel.
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (British)
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Description: The careers of Becky Sharp, the adventuress, and her husband, Rawdon Crawley, make an apt contrast to the
humdrum lives of the good hero and heroine, Dobbin and Amelia. The nobility, fashionable people about town, the mercantile
aristocracy and the needy classes below them, are all portrayed in the most lifelike way.
The Vicar of Wakefield – Oliver Goldsmith (British)
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Description: A story of the Vicar, Dr. Primrose, and his six children. The Vicar undergoes a series of terrible trials through no fault of
his own, and is eventually restored to prosperity.
Villette – Charlotte Bronte (British)
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Description: The narrator, Lucy Snowe, poor, plain, and friendless, finds herself a post as teacher in a girls’ school in Villette, where
she wins the respect of the capable, if unscrupulous headmistress, Madame Beck, and gains authority over the boisterous girls. She
becomes deeply attached to the handsome John Bretton, the school’s English doctor, in whom she recognizes an acquaintance from
her childhood, the son of her own godmother.
Waiting – Ha Jin (Asian)
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Description: A masterful novel of love and politics. Ha Jin's book could hardly be less theatrical, yet we're immediately engaged by
its narrative structure, by its wry humor and by the subtle, startling shifts it produces in our understanding of the characters and
their situation
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett (European)
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Description: A classic of modern theatre and perennial favorite of colleges and high schools. "One of the most noble and moving
plays of our generation . . . suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity . . . like a sharp stab of beauty and pain."--The
London Times.
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (Russian)
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Description: Against the background of Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early 1800s, Tolstoy's epic masterwork depicts five
families that span the social spectrum--their love affairs, intellectual struggles, and personal conflicts--and the cataclysmic effects of
great events on ordinary people.
Warden, The – Anthony Trollope (British)
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Description: The first of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, THE WARDEN explores the ethical dilemma of the Rev. Septimus Harding, the
gentle, cello-playing warden of a charitable home for elderly men. Unjustly accused of receiving money to which he is not entitled,
the modest and self-doubting Harding insists on resigning, feeling that his honor has been tarnished. Meanwhile, his repentant
accuser (an overzealous surgeon) marries Rev. Harding's daughter, Eleanor.
Watch that Ends the Night, The – Hugh MacLennan (Canadian)
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Description: Very interesting book. Takes you back to the time when the "in" thing to do was to go off and fight for a noble cause.
Contains the piece of the Tragically Hip sound "Courage" in it.
Way of All Flesh – Samuel butler (British)
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Description: THE WAY OF ALL FLESH is a thinly disguised account of Butler's own Victorian childhood. Butler began the work in 1872;
it was finally published in 1903, a year after his death. With irony and wit, he savaged contemporary values and beliefs, turning the
conventional family-history novel inside-out.
Where Angels Fear to Tread – E.M. Forster (British)
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Description: The domineering Mrs. Herriton dispatches her son Philip and her daughter Harriet to Italy to bring back the baby born
of her deceased son's wife Lilia and an Italian named Gino. Lilia's former chaperone, Caroline, goes with them, hoping to adopt the
baby to atone for her laxness in letting Lilia get mixed up with Gino in the first place. Unexpectedly opposed by Gino, who turns out
to be a devoted father, each member of this trio responds to Italy in his or her own way. The prim Harriet is shocked by the Italians,
but Philip and Caroline respond joyfully to their zest for life and freedom. The disputed baby meets a tragic end, Harriet remains
unchanged, but Philip and Caroline return to England changed, renewed, and with a greater appreciation for the spiritual.
Where the Heart Is – Billie Letts (American)
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Description: Abandoned by her boyfriend at a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma, Novalee Nation, 17 years old and seven months pregnant,
soon discovers the treasures hiding in this small Southwest town.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - Edward Albee (American)
Description: A play about a running fight between a wife and a husband.
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Wide Sargasso Sea –Jean Rhys (British)
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Description: This novel declares itself to be the history of Mr. Rochester's first wife--the madwoman in the attic in JANE EYRE,
described by Charlotte Brontë only as "a Creole heiress." Rhys (also from the Caribbean) was obsessed for years with the first Mrs.
Rochester, and finally felt compelled to do justice to the figure Brontë gave such short shrift to.
Winter in the Blood – James Welch (American)
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Description: The author of Fool's Crow and Indian Lawyer presents an extraordinary, evocative novel about a young Native American
coming to terms with his heritage--and his dreams. "A nearly flawless novel about human life."
Winter of Our Discontent, The – John Steinbeck (American)
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Description: Ethan Hawley, descendent of an old and proud New England family, is working as a clerk in a food store owned by a
family of Italian immigrants. His wife is restless and dissatisfied; his teenage children are troubled and discontented, hungry for the
material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own
scrupulous standards.
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor (American)
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Description: Wise Blood is the story of Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee. He returns from World War II and back at home falls
under the spell of street preacher Asa Hawks and his daughter, Lily Sabbath Hawks.
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence (British)
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Description: Echoing elements of Lawrence's own life, Women in Love delves into the mysteries between men and women as two
couples strive for love against a haunting backdrop of coal mines, factories, and a beleaguered working class.
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (British)
416 pages / 880 Lexile
Description: Emily Bronte's novel is about two families in Yorkshire, a brooding Byronic hero, and a love that is stronger than death.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS is her only novel--unless it is true that, upon her death, her sister Charlotte burned the manuscript of another.
Drawing on the Gothic tradition, it is a tale of obsession, and tells the story of Catherine Earnshaw, a willful and romantic girl
brought up to be a lady, and Heathcliff, the mysterious gypsy orphan. The relationship between these two remains tempestuous to
its end, and affects future generations of these complicated families. The novel's complex structure and point of view were ahead of
their time.
You Are Not a Stranger Here – Adam Haslett (American)
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Description: Those setting collection policy in public libraries are often forced to base their decisions on genre alone and will buy a
detective novel, for instance, at the expense of a collection of short stories, especially one by a first-time author. Haslett's debut
shows what is wrong with this approach. Courageous and compelling as any in today's fiction, the despairing characters in these nine
stories are all related to someone who has left or will leave them, usually owing to mental illness.
Zoot Suit – Luis Valdez (Hispanic American)
Description: A play by the most recognized and celebrated Hispanic playwright of our times.
= Title from AP Literature and Composition Exam Free Response Questions
= Title used five or more times
= Prize Winning Novel
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AP English Nonfiction
Ackerman, Diane – THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE
After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by
hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these "guests," and human names for the animals, it's no wonder that
the zoo's code name became "The House Under a Crazy Star." Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines
extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story—sharing Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's
wife," while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism.
Aresenault, Raymond – FREEDOM RIDERS: 1961 AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
They were black and white, young and old, men and women. In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding
buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of
the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond
Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America. The Freedom Riders were greeted
with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as
racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault
recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House--where the
Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle--to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison,
where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as
James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of
heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph. The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or "outside agitators." But indelible
images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation.
Barry, John – THE GREAT INFLUENZA: THE STORY OF THE DEADLIEST PANDEMIC IN HISTORY
At the height of WWI, history’s most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then
exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four months than AIDS killed in twenty-four
years, more in a year than the Black Death killed in a century. But this was not the Middle Ages, and 1918 marked the first collision of
science and epidemic disease. Magisterial in its breadth of perspective and depth of research and now revised to reflect the growing
danger of the avian flu, The Great Influenza is ultimately a tale of triumph amid tragedy, which provides us with a precise and sobering
model as we confront the epidemics looming on our own horizon.
Bowden, Mark – BLACK HAWK DOWN
Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War.
On October 3, 1993, about a hundred elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu,
Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour.
Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. The
following morning, eighteen Americans were dead and more than seventy had been badly wounded. Drawing on interviews from both
sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden’s minute-by-minute narrative is one of the
most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written—a riveting story that captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.
Bradley, James – FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire
that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island’s highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell
itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came
together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at
age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents
to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men’s paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a
classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific’s most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic
defenders who would fight to the last man.
Brown, Daniel James – THE BOYS IN THE BOAT: NINE AMERICANS AND THEIR EPIC QUEST FOR GOLD AT THE 1935 BERLIN OLYMPICS
Out of the depths of the Depression comes an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—
the improbable, intimate account of how nine working-class boys from the American West showed the world at the 1936 Olympics in
Berlin what true grit really meant. It was an unlikely quest from the start. With a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers,
and farmers, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and
Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler. The emotional heart of the
tale lies with Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not only to regain his shattered self-regard but also to find a
real place for himself in the world. Drawing on the boys’ own journals and vivid memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, Brown
has created an unforgettable portrait of an era, a celebration of a remarkable achievement, and a chronicle of one extraordinary young
man’s personal quest.
Carr, Nicholas – THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
“Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a
well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the
Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling
exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped
through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr
interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our
brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and
share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a
convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and
intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the
Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an
ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are
becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and
reflection.
Carson, Rachel – SILENT SPRING
First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of
indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a
runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a
generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters.”
*Douglass, Frederick – NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE
The impassioned abolitionist and eloquent orator provides graphic descriptions of his childhood and horrifying experiences as a slave as
well as a harrowing record of his dramatic escape to the North and eventual freedom. Published in 1845 to quell doubts about his origins,
the Narrative is admired today for its extraordinary passion, sensitive descriptions, and storytelling power.
Ehrenreich, Barbara – NICKEL AND DIMED: ON (NOT) GETTING BY IN AMERICA
Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity.
Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was
inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But
how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could
find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a
cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very
quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort.
She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you want to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America
in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival.
Fagin, Dan – TOMS RIVER: A STORY OF SCIENCE AND SALVATION
One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that
culminated in 2001 with one of the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic dumping. A town that would rather have been known
for its Little League World Series champions ended up making history for an entirely different reason: a notorious cluster of childhood
cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution. For years, large chemical companies had been using Toms River as their
private dumping ground, burying tens of thousands of leaky drums in open pits and discharging billions of gallons of acid-laced
wastewater into the town’s namesake river. In an astonishing feat of investigative reporting, prize-winning journalist Dan Fagin recounts
the sixty-year saga of rampant pollution and inadequate oversight that made Toms River a cautionary example for fast-growing industrial
towns from South Jersey to South China. He tells the stories of the pioneering scientists and physicians who first identified pollutants as a
cause of cancer, and brings to life the everyday heroes in Toms River who struggled for justice: a young boy whose cherubic smile belied
the fast-growing tumors that had decimated his body from birth; a nurse who fought to bring the alarming incidence of childhood cancers
to the attention of authorities who didn’t want to listen; and a mother whose love for her stricken child transformed her into a tenacious
advocate for change.
*Franklin, Benjamin – AUTOBIOGRAPHY
One of the most popular works of American literature, this charming self-portrait has been translated into nearly every language. It
covers Franklin's life up to his prewar stay in London as representative of the Pennsylvania Assembly, including his boyhood years, work
as a printer, experiments with electricity, political career, much more.
Gladwell, Malcolm – BLINK
Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually
aren't as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people
follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in
the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet
the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach
who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a
fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of "blink": the election of Warren Harding; "New Coke"; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo
by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren't those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating,
but those who have perfected the art of "thin-slicing"-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of
variables.
Gladwell, Malcolm – OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the
brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we
pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their
family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software
billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Golden, Daniel – THE PRICE OF ADMISSION: HOW AMERICA’S RULING CLASS BUYS ITS WAY INTO ELITE COLLEGES – AND WHO GETS LEFT OUTSIDE THE GATES
Every spring thousands of middle-class and lower-income high-school seniors learn that they have been rejected by America’s most
exclusive colleges. What they may never learn is how many candidates like themselves have been passed over in favor of wealthy white
students with lesser credentials—children of alumni, big donors, or celebrities. In this explosive book, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter
Daniel Golden argues that America, the so-called land of opportunity, is rapidly becoming an aristocracy in which America’s richest
families receive special access to elite higher education—enabling them to give their children even more of a head start. Based on two
years of investigative reporting and hundreds of interviews with students, parents, school administrators, and admissions personnel—
some of whom risked their jobs to speak to the author—The Price of Admission exposes the corrupt admissions practices that favor the
wealthy, the powerful, and the famous.
Goodwin, Doris Kearns – TEAM RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The life and times of Abraham Lincoln have been analyzed and dissected in countless books. Do we need another Lincoln biography?
In Team of Rivals, esteemed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin proves that we do. Though she can't help but cover some familiar territory,
her perspective is focused enough to offer fresh insights into Lincoln's leadership style and his deep understanding of human behavior
and motivation. Goodwin makes the case for Lincoln's political genius by examining his relationships with three men he selected for his
cabinet, all of whom were opponents for the Republican nomination in 1860: William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates.
These men, all accomplished, nationally known, and presidential, originally disdained Lincoln for his backwoods upbringing and lack of
experience, and were shocked and humiliated at losing to this relatively obscure Illinois lawyer. Yet Lincoln not only convinced them to
join his administration--Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general--he ultimately
gained their admiration and respect as well. How he soothed egos, turned rivals into allies, and dealt with many challenges to his
leadership, all for the sake of the greater good, is largely what Goodwin's fine book is about. Had he not possessed the wisdom and
confidence to select and work with the best people, she argues, he could not have led the nation through one of its darkest periods.
Greenblatt, Stephen – THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN
One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of
discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible
the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a
library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of
an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the
universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small
particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest
discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano
Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne
and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.
Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow – THE GRAND DESIGN
When and how did the universe begin? Why are we here? What is the nature of reality? Is the apparent “grand design” of our universe
evidence of a benevolent creator who set things in motion—or does science offer another explanation? In this startling and lavishly
illustrated book, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow present the most recent scientific thinking about these and other abiding
mysteries of the universe, in nontechnical language marked by brilliance and simplicity. According to quantum theory, the cosmos does
not have just a single existence or history. The authors explain that we ourselves are the product of quantum fluctuations in the early
universe, and show how quantum theory predicts the “multiverse”—the idea that ours is just one of many universes that appeared
spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature. They conclude with a riveting assessment of M-theory, an explanation
of the laws governing our universe that is currently the only viable candidate for a “theory of everything”: the unified theory that Einstein
was looking for, which, if confirmed, would represent the ultimate triumph of human reason.
Hvistendahl, Mara – UNNATURAL SELECTION: CHOOSING BOYS OVER GIRLS, AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF A WORLD FULL OF MEN
Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These
numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach
adulthood, their generation will have twenty-four million more men than women. The prognosis for China's neighbors is no less bleak:
Asia now has 163 million females "missing" from its population. Gender imbalance reaches far beyond Asia, affecting Georgia, Eastern
Europe, and cities in the U.S. where there are significant immigrant populations. The world, therefore, is becoming increasingly male, and
this mismatch is likely to create profound social upheaval. Historically, eras in which there have been an excess of men have produced
periods of violent conflict and instability. Mara Hvistendahl has written a stunning, impeccably-researched book that does not flinch from
examining not only the consequences of the misbegotten policies of sex selection but Western complicity with them.
Kotlowitz, Alex – THERE ARE NO CHILDREN HERE
There Are No Children Here, the true story of brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 at the start, brings home the horror of
trying to make it in a violence-ridden public housing project. The boys live in a gang-plagued war zone on Chicago's West Side, literally
learning how to dodge bullets the way kids in the suburbs learn to chase baseballs. "If I grow up, I'd like to be a bus driver," says Lafeyette
at one point. That's if, not when--spoken with the complete innocence of a child. The book's title comes from a comment made by the
brothers' mother as she and author Alex Kotlowitz contemplate the challenges of living in such a hostile environment: "There are no
children here," she says. "They've seen too much to be children." This book humanizes the problem of inner-city pathology, makes
readers care about Lafeyette and Pharoah more than they may expect to, and offers a sliver of hope buried deep within a world of chaos.
Kozol, Jonathon – AMAZING GRACE
Amazing Grace is Jonathan Kozol’s classic book on life and death in the South Bronx—the poorest urban neighborhood of the United
States. He brings us into overcrowded schools, dysfunctional hospitals, and rat-infested homes where families have been ravaged by
depression and anxiety, drug-related violence, and the spread of AIDS. But he also introduces us to devoted and unselfish teachers,
dedicated ministers, and—at the heart and center of the book—courageous and delightful children. The children we come to meet
through the friendships they have formed with Jonathan defy the stereotypes of urban youth too frequently presented by the media.
Tender, generous, and often religiously devout, they speak with eloquence and honesty about the poverty and racial isolation that have
wounded but not hardened them. Amidst all of the despair, it is the very young whose luminous capacity for love and transcendent sense
of faith in human decency give reason for hope.
Levitin, Daniel J. – THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON MUSIC: THE SCIENCE OF A HUMAN OBSESSION
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it - and the human brain. Drawing on the latest research and on
musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, Levitin reveals: how composers produce some of the most
pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way our brains make sense of the world; why we are so emotionally attached to
the music we listened to as teenagers, whether it was Fleetwood Mac, U2, or Dr. Dre; that practice, rather than talent, is the driving force
behind musical expertise; how those insidious little jingles (called earworms) get stuck in our head. Taking on prominent thinkers who
argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even
more so than language.
Levitt, Steven – FREAKONOMICS: A ROGUE ECONOMIST EXPLORES THE HIDDEN SIDE OF EVERYTHING
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do
parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist.
He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn
conventional wisdom on its head. Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an awardwinning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets
of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of
incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.
Nafisi, Azar – READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Azar Nafisi, a bold and inspired teacher, secretly gathered seven of
her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. Some came from conservative and religious families, others
were progressive and secular; some had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to
speak their minds, but soon they removed their veils and began to speak more freely–their stories intertwining with the novels they were
reading by Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in
Tehran, as fundamentalists seized hold of the universities and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the women in Nafisi’s living room
spoke not only of the books they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments.
Robbins, Alexandra – THE GEEKS SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH
In a smart, entertaining, reassuring book that reads like fiction, Alexandra Robbins manages to cross Gossip Girl with Freaks and
Geeks and explain the fascinating psychology and science behind popularity and outcasthood. She reveals that the things that set
students apart in high school are the things that help them stand out later in life. Robbins intertwines various narratives--often
triumphant, occasionally heartbreaking, and always captivating--with essays exploring subjects like the secrets of popularity, being
excluded doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you, why outsiders succeed, how schools make the social scene worse--and how to
fix it.
Robbins, Alexandra – OVERACHIEVERS: THE SECRET LIVES OF DRIVEN KIDS
In The Overachievers, journalist Alexandra Robbins delivers a poignant, funny, riveting narrative that explores how our high-stakes
educational culture has spiraled out of control. During the year of her ten-year reunion, Robbins returns to her high school, where she
follows students. Robbins tackles hard-hitting issues such as the student and teacher cheating epidemic, over-testing, sports rage, the
black market for study drugs, and a college admissions process so cutthroat that some students are driven to depression and suicide
because of a B. Even the earliest years of schooling have become insanely competitive, as Robbins learned when she gained
unprecedented access into the inner workings of a prestigious Manhattan kindergarten admissions office. A compelling mix of fast-paced
storytelling and engrossing investigative journalism, The Overachievers aims both to calm the admissions frenzy and to expose its
escalating dangers.
Rodriquez, Deborah – KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL: AN AMERICAN WOMAN GOES BEHIND THE VEIL
Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this
war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills–as doctors, nurses, and therapists–seemed eminently more practical than
her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a gift
for befriending Afghans, and once her profession became known she was eagerly sought out by Westerners desperate for a good haircut
and by Afghan women, who have a long and proud tradition of running their own beauty salons. Thus an idea was born. With the help of
corporate and international sponsors, the Kabul Beauty School welcomed its first class in 2003. Well-meaning but sometimes brazen,
Rodriguez stumbled through language barriers, overstepped cultural customs, and constantly juggled the challenges of a postwar nation
even as she learned how to empower her students to become their families’ breadwinners by learning the fundamentals of coloring
techniques, haircutting, and makeup. Yet within the small haven of the beauty school, the line between teacher and student quickly
blurred as these vibrant women shared with Rodriguez their stories and their hearts: the newlywed who faked her virginity on her
wedding night, the twelve-year-old bride sold into marriage to pay her family’s debts, the Taliban member’s wife who pursued her
training despite her husband’s constant beatings. Through these and other stories, Rodriguez found the strength to leave her own
unhealthy marriage and allow herself to love again, Afghan style.
Scholsser, Eric – FAST FOOD NATION: THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL-AMERICAN MEAL
In 2001, Fast Food Nation was published to critical acclaim and became an international bestseller. Eric Schlosser’s exposé revealed how
the fast food industry has altered the landscape of America, widened the gap between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and
transformed food production throughout the world. The book changed the way millions of people think about what they eat and helped
to launch today’s food movement. In a new afterword for this edition, Schlosser discusses the growing interest in local and organic food,
the continued exploitation of poor workers by the food industry, and the need to ensure that every American has access to good,
healthy, affordable food. Fast Food Nation is as relevant today as it was a decade ago. The book inspires readers to look beneath the
surface of our food system, consider its impact on society and, most of all, think for themselves.
Skloot, Rebecca – THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her
knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping,
and more. Henrietta's cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can't afford
health insurance. This phenomenal New York Times bestseller tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of
scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew.
*Thoreau, Henry David – WALDEN
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin by Walden Pond. With the intention of immersing himself in nature and distancing
himself from the distractions of social life, Thoreau sustained his retreat for just over two years. More popular than ever, Walden is a
paean to the virtues of simplicity and self-sufficiency.
Turkle, Sherry – ALONE TOGETHER: WHY WE EXPECT MORE FROM TECHNOLOGY AND LESS FROM EACH OTHER
Technology has become the architect of our intimacies. Online, we fall prey to the illusion of companionship, gathering thousands of
Twitter and Facebook friends and confusing tweets and wall posts with authentic communication. But, as MIT technology and society
specialist Sherry Turkle argues, this relentless connection leads to a new solitude. As technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp
down. Alone Together is the result of Turkle's nearly fifteen-year exploration of our lives on the digital terrain. Based on hundreds of
interviews, it describes new unsettling relationships between friends, lovers, parents, and children, and new instabilities in how we
understand privacy and community, intimacy, and solitude.
Vowell, Sarah – ASSASSINATION VACATION
New York Times bestselling author of The Word Shipmates and contributor to NPR’s “This American Life” Sarah Vowell embarks on a road
trip to sites of political violence, from Washington DC to Alaska, to better understand our nation’s ever-evolving political system and
history.
Wolfe, Tom – THE RIGHT STUFF
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar experiments with experimental rocket-powered,
high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the first Project Mercury astronauts selected for the NASA space program. The
Right Stuff is based on extensive research by Wolfe, who interviewed test pilots, the astronauts and their wives, among others. The story
contrasts the "Mercury Seven" and their families with test pilots such as Chuck Yeager, who was considered by many contemporaries as
the best of them all, but who was never selected as an astronaut. Wolfe wrote that the book was inspired by the desire to find out why
the astronauts accepted the danger of space flight. He recounts the enormous risks that test pilots were already taking, and the mental
and physical characteristics—the titular "right stuff"—required for and reinforced by their jobs. Wolfe likens the astronauts to "single
combat warriors" from an earlier era who received the honor and adoration of their people before going forth to fight on their behalf.
AP Language Reading List
Autobiography / Memoir
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year. (Pulitzer author about childhood and baseball)
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays With Morrie. (Dying teacher and life-long student)
McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes. (Poverty, starvation, and exuberance in depression Ireland)
McCourt, Frank. Tis’ (Continuation of McCourt’s story in NY)
McCourt, Malachy. Swimming with Monks. (Frank’s brother tells his side of the story)
Ashe, Arthur. Days of Grace. (Ashe’s personal struggles with prejudice and AIDS)
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. (Life to age 19 in the deep south)
Griffin, John Howard. Black Like Me. (Eyewitness history by white man who becomes black)
Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory. (Social assimilation / education with alienation)
Karr, Mary. The Liar’s Club. (Poetic insight into one of the ugliest places on earth)
Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. (Somber, dark funny story of growing up in the ‘50’s)
Drakulic, Slavenka. Café Europa. (Idiosyncratic look at westernized ex-communist countries)
Wideman, John Edgar. Brothers and Keepers. (One a professor, the other an inmate)
Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. (Imprisonment, resistance, justice)
Mathabane, Mark. Kaffir Boy. (Civil rights in South Africa)
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. (Life as a tramp in Europe)
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road. (Account of her rise from poverty to prominence)
Dawson, George. Life is So Good. (101 year old recounts life in context of 20th century)
Armstrong, Lance. It’s Not About the Bike. (Honest, open, smart autobiography)
Moss, Barbara. Change Me Into Zeus’ Daughter. (Female version of Angela’s Ashes)
Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking. (Essays by a small town undertaker)
Conover, Ted. Newjack. (Chronicles a year as a prison guard at Sing-Sing)
Gawande, Atul. Complications. (A surgeon writes about his ‘craft’)
Eire, Carlos. Waiting for Snow in Havana. (Yale prof. about his childhood in Cuba before Revolution)
Angelou, Maya I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (African-American writer traces her coming of age)
Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle (story of childhood with eccentric, bordering on abusive, parents)
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (graphic novel--author describes her youth in revolutionary Iran)
Mortenson, Greg and David Oliver Relin. Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time. (sheltered
and nursed in a remote mountain village, author vows to return to build schools throughout Pakistan and Afghanistan)
Krakauer, John. Three Cups of Deceit: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way (Krakauer's investigation revealing
the "truth" about Mortenson's story)
Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father (memoir of a young girl whose life torn apart by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia)
Sheff, David. Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey through His Son's Addiction. (father’s anguished account of his promising son’s meth
addiction and its painful impact on the entire family is honest, raw, and full of information about the realities of drug addiction)
White, Neil. In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (man sent to prison set in last leper colony in America)
Biography
Sobel, Dava. Galileo’s Daughter. (Father/daughter’s vastly different worlds)
McBride, James. The Color of Water. (A tribute to his remarkable mother)
Gunther, John. Death Be Not Proud. (Father tells of 17 year old’s struggle with brain tumor)
McCullough, David. John Adams. (Palace intrigue, scandal, and political brilliance)
Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage (Classic study of courageous lives)
Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. (story of female circumcision in Africa and traumatic results)
Ellis, Joseph. Founding Brothers. (6 stories about the “gestative” 1790’s)
Maraniss, David. When Pride Still Mattered: The Life of Vince Lombardi. (touchstone for 60’s)
Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. (Insightful bio of his career and relationships)
Leblanc, Adrian Nicole. Random Family. (Four teens grow up in the Bronx)
Krakauer, Jon. Under the Banner of Heaven. (Violent religious extremism in our own country)
Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. (Comprehensive and intimate look at a great scientist)
Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (author struggles to come to terms with his parents' brutal past at Auschwitz in this
seminal graphic novel)
Nature / Adventure / Science
Kinder, Gary. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. (Engineer’s scheme to salvage $1 billion)
Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm. (Swordfish boat vs. Mother Nature)
Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air. (Everest climb gone wrong)
Larson, Erik. Isaac’s Storm. (1900 hurricane still deadliest of all time)
Sobel, Dava. Longitude. (Thorniest scientific problem of 18th century is solved)
Werbach, Adam. Act Now, Apologize Later. (former Sierra Club pres. On steps to stop environment loss)
Fromm, Peter. Indian Creek Chronicles. (modern day Walden in Idaho wilderness)
Winchester, Simon. The Map the Changed the World. (obscure historical figure with strong impact on civ.)
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. (practical advice for aspiring writers and life in general)
Alvarez, Walter. T.Rex and the Crater of Doom(story of impact theory of dinosaur extinction development)
Roach, Mary. Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers(humorous, touching, and respectful look at how scientists utilize the human
body)
Silverstein, Ken. The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor (boy's obsession with
nuclear energy creates radioative device with potential to spark environmental disaster in his community)
Menzel, Peter and Faith D'Aluisio. Hungry Planet: What the World Eats.(photo-chronicle of families around the world, the food they
eat, and how uncontrollable forces like poverty, conflict and globalization affect our most elemental human need – food)
Firlik, Katrina. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. (honest appraisal of work as a doctor)
Melville, Greg. Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future(humorous
road trip with the author and his college buddy in a converted 1980’s Mercedes from Vermont to California, and learn a little about
how to be more eco-friendly along the way)
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (spends 26 months alone in the woods to "front the essential facts of life.")
Thompson, Gabriel. Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do (author works in various
unskilled labor jobs providing engaging and gruesome details)
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (story of a woman whose cancerous cells were developed in culture without
her knowledge and became the HeLa line scientists used in researching some of the most important and astounding medical
discoveries of the 20th century)
Sports
Remnick, David. King of the World. (Ali as racial and cultural hero in the 1950’s)
Reynolds, Bill. Fall River Dreams. (team searches for glory, town searches for soul)
Gildea, William. Where the Game Still Matters. (Last championship season in Indiana)
Millman, Chad. The Odds. (1 season, 3 gamblers in Las Vegas)
Dent, Jim. The Junction Boys. (10 days in training camp with Bear Bryant)
Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. (how Oakland A’s general manager is changing baseball)
Conroy, Pat. My Losing Season. (famous author on his senior year at The Citadel)
Riley, Rick. Who’s Your Caddie? (Sports Illustrated writer caddies for famous people)
McManus, James. Positively 5th Street. (World series of poker and murder in Vegas)
Shapiro, Michael. The Last Great Season. (Brooklyn Dodgers 1956 pennant race)
Powell, Robert Andrew. We Own This Game. (Pop Warner football in Miami run by race, politics, money)
Asinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series. (the scandal and damage caused)
History / Politics / War
Lacey, Robert and Danny Danziger. The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millenium
(facts and principles inside and outside Saxon England)
Winchester, Simon. The Professor and The Madman. (tale of compilation of Oxford Dictionary)
Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage. (Compelling story of Lewis and Clark expedition)
Tuban, Jeffrey. A Vast Conspiracy. (well researched account of Clinton tragedy)
Sontag, Sherry. Blindman’s Bluff. (story of American submarine espionage, for Clancy fans)
Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization. (just what the title suggests)
Herman, Arthur. How the Scots Invented the Modern World. (just what the title suggests)
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Notes on a Kidnapping. (investigation behind Pablo Escobar’s terror)
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Gems, and Steel. (readable work of 13,000 years of history)
Larson, Erik. The Devil and the White City. (the Chicago World’s Fair and the first serial killer)
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. (behind the scenes at the most popular restaurants)
Fleming, Thomas. Duel. (story of duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton)
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point. (explains why changes in society occur suddenly)
Gourevitch, Phillip. We Wish to Inform You Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families. (Rwanda
Genocide)
Menzies, Gavin. 1421: The Year China Discovered America. (discovery before Columbus?)
Huggington, Arianna. Pigs at the Trough. (what to do about greedy CEOs and politicians)
Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam. (origins of 9-11 thru history of conflict between Islam and West)
Levitt, Stephen and Stephen Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. (interesting
illumination of mysteries of everyday life)
Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (advances in technology)
Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Tuchman, Barbara A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (example of a single feudal lord to trace the history of the
14th century)
Machiavelli, Niccolo The Prince (A treatise giving the absolute ruler practical advice on ways to maintain a strong central
government)
Karlsen, Carol The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (The status of women in colonial society
affects the Salem witch accusations)
Epstein, Norrie Friendly Shakespeare: A Thoroughly Painless Guide to the Best of the Bard (perspective on Shakespeare's works
through these sidelights, interpretations, anecdotes, and historical insights)
Gwynne, S.C. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, The Most Powerful Indian
Tribe in American History (war with Comanches, story of Cynthia Parker whose son became the last and greatest chief of the
Comanche tribe)
True Crime
Berendt, John. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.(entertaining true crime story)
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. (the first, some say the best, in this category)
Cornwell, Patricia. Portrait of a Killer. (the Jack the Ripper crimes are solved?)
Metress, Christopher. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. (murder in the south)
Travelogue
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (travel, philosophy and bikes)
Paterniti, Michael. Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain. (yes, it’s true)
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. (cross country bohemian adventure)
Wolfe, Tom. Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. (Wolfe travels with the Merry Pranksters)
*Reading list compiled from American Library Association Young Adult Library Services Outstanding Books for the College Bound and
Lifelong Learners
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/booklistsawards/outstandingbooks/2009/obcb09.cfm
Advanced Placement Summer Institutes, Numerous College Summer Reading Lists
40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read
from Marc and Angel Hack Life at
http://www.marcandangel.com/2009/08/24/40-modern-nonfiction-books-everyone-should-read/
1.
The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck – Pretty much the granddaddy of all self-improvement books, it’s easily one of the
best nonfiction works I’ve ever read. By melding love, science, and spirituality into a primer for personal growth, Peck
guides the reader through lessons on delaying gratification, accepting responsibility for decisions, dedicating oneself to
truth and reality, and creating a balanced lifestyle.
2.
Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton – The book’s basic point is sound – honesty is the best policy. With a brash, ‘in your face’
writing style, Blanton states that lying is the primary cause of human stress and advocates strict truthfulness as the key to
achieving intimacy in relationships and happiness in life.
3.
The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin – Josh Waitzkin transformed himself from a championship chess master into an elite
Tai Chi martial arts practitioner. This book is part autobiography, part chess memoir, and part martial arts philosophy.
Essentially, Waitzkin offers his own approach to becoming a student and applying certain disciplines and habits toward
learning and eventually mastering any skill.
4.
Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by Adam Shepard – Shepard started his life over
from scratch in Charleston, South Carolina, with $25 and the clothes on his back. He lived in a homeless shelter while
looking for work. His goal was to start with nothing and, within a year, work hard enough to save $2500, buy a car, and to
live in a furnished apartment. “Scratch Beginnings” is sometimes sad, sometimes amusing, pointed and thought provoking all the makings of a book well worth reading.
5.
The Joy of Simple Living by Jeff Davidson – A great resource for anyone wanting to cut down on the clutter and confusion in
their life. Davidson takes a step-by-step, easy to follow approach to simplifying your house, garage, office, car, etc. Not only
will you learn to create an orderly home, you’ll gain the knowledge necessary to be a more successful spouse, parent, and
worker by learning how to prioritize and simplify.
6.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini – Arguably the best book on the science of persuasion. Cialdini
explains the six psychological principles that drive our powerful impulse to comply to the pressures of others and shows
how we can defend ourselves against manipulation (or put these principles to work for our own interests).
7.
Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Ecker – This book competently discusses the missing link between wanting
success and achieving it. If you suspect that your mindset is holding you back from making more money and achieving your
goals, you’d be wise to give this title a thorough read.
8.
Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson – Farson zeros in on the paradoxes of communication, the politics of
management, and the dilemmas of change, exploring relationships within organizations and offering a unique perspective
on the challenges managers face. I highly recommend this book for anyone in a management or leadership role, including
parents and teachers.
9.
Overachievement by John Eliot – According to Eliot, in order to achieve spectacular success, one must change his or her
thoughts about pressure and learn to welcome it, enjoy it, and make it work. Eliot says that goal-setting, relaxation, and
visualization, the typical self-help suggestions, just don’t work well for most people. This book provides some great food for
thought that attempts to counteract the primary points of other major self-help gurus.
10. The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz – This is another classic self-improvement book. Schwartz gives the reader
useful, proactive steps for achieving success. He presents a clear-cut program for getting the most out of your job,
marriage, family life, and other relationships. In doing so, he proves that you don’t need to be an intellectual or have innate
talent to attain great success and satisfaction in life.
11. An Incomplete Education: 3,684 Things You Should Have Learned but Probably Didn’t by Judy Jones – Simply fun and
insightful, this book is truly a wonderful supplement to any person’s mental knowledgebase. It’s basically an intellectual
outline of history with a lot of helpful charts and guides. It’s written in a very humorous tone and nails the humor attempts
more often than not. Whether you’re interested in a ‘refresher’ or just a quick briefing on an academic area you never had
time for, this book is for you. It’s not in depth, but it does tell you what you should know in all areas, including history,
philosophy, music, art, and even film.
12. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie – Easily one of the best and most popular books on peopleskills ever written. Carnegie uses his adept storytelling skills to illustrate how to be successful by making the most of human
relations.
13. How to Talk to Anyone by Leil Lowndes – Another practical book about conversational people skills. Lowndes helps the
reader discover how to make small talk work, how to break the ice, how to network at a party, how to use body language to
captivate your audience, and much more.
14. The Irresistible Offer by Mark Joyner – Create an irresistible offer. Present it to people who need it. And sell it almost
instantly. A great sales and marketing primer for anyone trying to sell something.
15. Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich – This is the book that provoked Adam Shepard to write “Scratch Beginnings.” It’s
another first person perspective on poverty in America. In the book, Ehrenreich moves into a trailer and works as a
waitress, hotel maid, and Wal-Mart sales clerk. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and
duality. I found it to be an extremely thought-provoking read.
16. The Power of Less by Leo Babuta – Babuta’s message is simple: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest. Get on your way
to living a simpler life in order to do and achieve the things that are of real value to you and your family. This is my favorite
book on the art of simplicity.
17. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell – Gladwell embarks on an intellectual journey to figure out what
separates the best, the brightest, and the most successful people from everyone else. He investigates these high achievers
by looking closely at their culture, family, generation, and the individual experiences of their upbringing. This book really
gets you thinking about success from a totally different perspective.
18. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner – This book just may redefine the way you look at the modern world.
Through skillful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and Dubner set out to explore the hidden side of everything from the
inner workings of a crack gang to the myths of political campaign finance to the true importance or unimportance of gun
control. It’s an eye-opening read.
19. Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy – This book is probably exactly what you would expect from a well-written, classic
self-improvement book. Tracy’s straightforward advice is accompanied by easy-to-do exercises and enhanced with inspiring
stories of successful, highly motivated achievers in many fields.
20. You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself by Harry Beckwith – Beckwith concentrates on the importance of being a considerate
human being as it relates to running a successful business or living a successful life. The title is somewhat deceiving because
the book is more about giving than it is about selling… or should I say, it’s about giving as a way to sell yourself. Either way,
this book is packed with practical tips and insightful stories.
21. Getting Things Done by David Allen – The ultimate ‘organize your life’ book. Allen’s ideas and processes are for all those
people who are overwhelmed with too many things to do, too little time to do them, and a general sense of unease that
something important is being missed. The primary goal of this book is to teach you how to effectively get your ‘to-do inbox’
to empty.
22. The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit by Seth Godin – Godin challenges the age old idea that winners
never quit. He states that every new project or career starts out exciting and fun. Then it gets hard and less fun, until it hits
a low point - and at that point you have to figure out if you’re in a dip or at a dead-end. This book provides a look at how
the market actually expects people to quit and what to do about it. It’s a short and insightful read.
23. Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely – Looks at the reasons so many of us continuously make irrational decisions on a daily
basis. It’s a scientific but easily readable and unquestionably insightful look about why we do what we do on a daily basis,
and why we never change our ways even though we often ‘know better.’
24. The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read by Daniel R. Solin – A short, no-fluff guide to investing. Solin provides an
easy-to-follow four step plan that allows investors to create and monitor their portfolios in 90 minutes or less per year,
explaining how to asses risk and how to allocate assets to maximize returns and minimize volatility. This book was
absolutely invaluable to me when I first started investing my money.
25. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey – A classic self-improvement book. Covey presents a principlecentered approach for solving personal and professional problems by delivering a step-by-step guide for living with integrity
and honesty and adapting to the inevitable change life brings us everyday. It’s a must-read.
26. Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath – Why do some ideas and stories thrive while others die? And how do we
improve the chances that our ideas and stories will catch on with others? Heath and Heath tackle these questions head-on.
This book is extremely entertaining, while simultaneously providing practical, tangible strategies for makings things stick.
27. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser – “What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the last forty thousand,”
Schlosser observes, yet most Americans know very little about how that food is made, where, by whom, and at what cost.
In a wonderfully horrifying way, this book exposes the American fast food industry’s evil side. It’s a true eye-opener.
28. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert – Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology has studied happiness for decades,
and he shares scientific findings that just might change the way you look at the world. His primary goal is to persuade you
into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where you imagined it would be. This is my favorite book on
happiness by a long shot.
29. The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki – Surowiecki argues that “under the right circumstances, groups are
remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” He uses statistical examples to backup this
theory. For example: “…the TV studio audience of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire guesses correctly 91 percent of the time,
compared to ‘experts’ who guess only 65 percent correctly.” Hmm… perhaps this is why Wikipedia is so successful.
30. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss – Ferris challenges us to evaluate our perspective on the cost and availability of our
dreams. And he teaches us that hard work isn’t very hard when you love what you’re doing. Although there’s certainly
some pages of self promotion within, Ferris provides invaluable tips to help us remain aligned with our goals, set
expectations on our terms, and eliminate unnecessary time-sinks while increasing our overall effectiveness.
31. Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina – A surprisingly well-written, broad, and totally raw look at the
different aspects of self-improvement. Pavlina skillfully unveils the truth about what it takes to consciously grow as a
human being by teaching what he calls ‘the seven universal principles’ behind all successful personal growth efforts.
32. The Now Habit by Neil Fiore – Quite possibly the best book ever written on overcoming procrastination. Fiore provides an
optimistic, empathetic, and factual explanation of why we procrastinate and then delivers practical, immediately applicable
tips for reversing the procrastination spell. On many levels, this book saved my life.
33. Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod – Where does inspiration and creativity come from? This little book attempts to
uncover this mystery. MacLeod states that creativity is not a genetic trait, nor is it reserved for professionals. Everyone is
creative sooner or later, but unfortunately, most people have it drilled out of them when they’re young. MacLeod’s primary
goal is to un-drill it and unleash your creative mind.
34. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi – Ferrazzi explains the guiding principles he has mastered over a lifetime of personal and
professional networking and describes what it takes to build the kind of lasting, mutually beneficial relationships that lead
to professional and personal success. Most of this book is fantastic - you learn how to relate to people, how to establish
contacts and maintain connections, and how to create a social network. If you interact with a lot of people on a regular
basis, it’s a great read.
35. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki – This inspiring work ranks with the great Zen classics, in a voice and
language completely adapted to modern-day sensibilities. Suzuki’s words breathe with the joy and simplicity that make a
liberated life possible. As he reveals the actual practice of Zen as a discipline for daily life, the reader begins to understand
what Zen is truly about. If you’re even slightly curious about the practice of Zen Buddhism, you’ll find this book to be
extremely enlightening.
36. Eating Well For Optimum Health by Andrew Weil – If you only read one health and nutrition book in your whole lifetime,
read this one. Weil sheds light on the often confusing and conflicting ideas circulating about good nutrition, addressing
specific health issues and offering nutritional guidance to help heal and prevent major illnesses. Of particular value is his
examination of recent dieting fads, such as low-carbohydrate, vegan and ‘Asian’ diets, with an eye toward debunking the
myths about them while highlighting their benefits.
37. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – Gladwell looks at how small ideas can spread like viruses, sparking global
sociological changes. The ‘tipping point’ is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold,
tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely
targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.
38. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn – Although this book is likely to be more interesting to Americans
than citizens of other countries, it’s truly a great read either way. Covering Christopher Columbus’s arrival through
President Clinton’s years in office, as well as the 2000 election and the War on Terrorism, the book features an insightful
and frank analysis of the most important events in American history told from the perspective of minorities and the working
class.
39. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi – This is the ultimate personal finance book for twenty-somethings (and anyone
else in need of a financial planning makeover). It’s one thing to know about finance, another to be able to write about it,
and another entirely to write about it in a way that aptly motivates the younger generation. Ramit hits the tri-fecta here. He
tells you exactly what to do with your money and why.
40. Career Renegade by Jonathan Fields – This book is simply about building a great living around what you love to do most.
And it’s one of the best guides I’ve ever read on the subject. Fields, a big-time lawyer turned serial entrepreneur, shows you
how to turn your passion - whether it’s cooking or copywriting, teaching or playing video games - into a better payday and a
richly satisfying career.