Lit Circle/Research
Mega Project
Book Choices – Spring 2014
Part I: The Novel
• Students will read a self-selected novel from a wellknown American author.
• Reading will be done independently, but group
members will create a meeting schedule to guide them
throughout the project.
• Through organized note-taking, group members will be
responsible for preparing plot summaries, discussion
questions, out-of-text connections, and other tasks
related to the reading of the novel.
• Mr. Parker will provide assistance in teaching notetaking strategies, managing reading schedules, and
guiding independent reading.
Part II: The Research
• Students will research a topic related to their novel using
multiple credible sources and proper research methods.
• Research can be tied to a theme, event, character, idea or
concept from within the novel.
• All research will be done independently and will be shared
as part of the group discussion.
• Research topics will not be duplicated within a group.
• Group members should prepare a multi-page research
paper, complete with works cited page, annotated
bibliography, and outline (for discussion).
• Mr. Parker will provide assistance in teaching research
methods, research paper structuring, and source
evaluation.
Part III: The Discussion
• Students will participate in a self-governed fishbowl
discussion at the end of the unit.
• Discussions will incorporate personal analysis of both
the novel and the connected research.
• Groups should prepare for sustained discussions of 1520 minutes.
• Discussions will follow the fishbowl model in which
groups discussions will be observed by classmates.
• Mr. Parker will provide assistance in moderating
discussion, but will not participate in maintaining or
extending discussions.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight
in Heaven by Sherman Alexie
When it was first published in 1993, The Lone Ranger and
Tonto Fistfight in Heaven established Sherman Alexie as a
stunning new talent of American letters. The basis for the
award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his
most beloved and widely praised books. In this darkly
comic collection, Alexie brilliantly weaves memory,
fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic
portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian
Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are
narrated by characters raised on humiliation and
government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion
and affection, myth and dream. Against a backdrop of
alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie
depicts the distances between Indians and whites,
reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women,
and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of
the past.
Lexile: 830
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules
and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires
rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal
of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in
which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions
produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred,
who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he
meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces
him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present
where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of
the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly
disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever
known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his
pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
Lexile: 890
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks in the small town of Cold
Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, E.
Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is
barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age
and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind
of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds
himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his
adventures begin.
Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and
extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life
in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and
loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive
Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and
resplendent treasure.
Lexile: 930
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
The Education of Little Tree
by Forrest Carter
The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very
young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and halfCherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of
Tennessee during the Great Depression.“Little Tree” as his
grandparents call him is shown how to hunt and survive in the
mountains, to respect nature in the Cherokee Way, taking only
what is needed, leaving the rest for nature to run its course.
Little Tree also learns the often callous ways of white
businessmen and tax collectors, and how Granpa, in hilarious
vignettes, scares them away from his illegal attempts to enter
the cash economy. Granma teaches Little Tree the joys of
reading and education. But when Little Tree is taken away by
whites for schooling, we learn of the cruelty meted out to
Indian children in an attempt to assimilate them and of Little
Tree’s perception of the Anglo world and how it differs from
the Cherokee Way.
Lexile: 890
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer
The book's narrator is a nine-yearold boy named Oskar Schell. Two
years before the story begins,
Oskar's father dies on 9/11. In the
story, Oskar discovers a key in a vase
that belonged to his father that
inspires him to search all of New
York for information about the key.
Lexile: 940
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
by Ken Kesey
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest has left an indelible mark on the literature of our
time. Turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads,
the novel tells the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its
inhabitants, especially tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick
McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose
her. We see the story through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly
mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's
heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all
imprisoned.
Hailed upon its publication as "a glittering parable of good and evil" (The
New York Times Book Review) and "a roar of protest against middlebrow
society's Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them" (Time),
Kesey's powerful book went on to sell millions of copies and remains as
bracing and insightful today as when it was first released.
Lexile: 1110
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
The Things They Carried
by Tim O’Brien
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped
changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary
scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking
meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the
redemptive power of storytelling.
The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha
Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell
Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim
O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a
father and writer at the age of forty-three.
It has become required reading for any American and
continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact
and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.
Lexile: 880
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift
with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In
1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco,
begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in
shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck
Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise
their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something
already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty
years later the stories and history continue.
With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful,
often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and
daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the
truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more
entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters
roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their
matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to
immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Lexile: 800
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Nickel and Dimed
by Barbara Ehrenreich
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 int to live indoors.
Lexile: 1340
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
No Horizon Is So Far
by Ann Bancroft
The first women to cross the
continent of Antarctica on foot
"prove that nothing is beyond our
wildest dreams" (Billie Jean King)
in this riveting true-life adventure
of suspense, danger, and
endurance.
Hiroshima by John Hersey
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
few could have anticipated its potential for
devastation. Pulitzer prize-winning author John
Hersey recorded the stories of Hiroshima residents
shortly after the explosion and, in 1946, Hiroshima
was published, giving the world first-hand accounts
from people who had survived it. The words of Miss
Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamara, Father Kleinsorg,
Dr. Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto gave a face
to the statistics that saturated the media and
solicited an overwhelming public response.
Whether you believe the bomb made the difference
in the war or that it should never have been
dropped, "Hiroshima" is a must read for all of us
who live in the shadow of armed conflict.
Lexile: 1190
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has
bought her a few years, Hazel has never been
anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed
upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist
named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer
Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be
completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our
Stars brilliantly explores the funny, thrilling, and
tragic business of being alive and in love.
Lexile: 850
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Divergent by Veronica Roth
In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is
divided into five factions, each dedicated to the
cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the
honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the
brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the
intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all
sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which
they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice,
the decision is between staying with her family and
being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she
makes a choice that surprises everyone, including
herself.
Lexile: 700
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees
entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as
the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life-which means
getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get
the right job-Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam,
and does. That's when things start to get crazy.
At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to
the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon
sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes
unbearable and Craig stops eating and sleeping-until, one night, he
nearly kills himself.
Craig's suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital,
where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who
has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected
President Armelio. There, isolated from the crushing pressures of
school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his
anxiety.
Lexile: 700
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her
entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island
home and gator-wrestling theme park in the
Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s
mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the
family is plunged into chaos; her father
withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky
character known as the Dredgeman, and her
brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park
called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on
a mission through the magical swamps to save
them all, we are drawn into a lush and bravely
imagined debut that takes us to the shimmering
edge of reality.
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made
publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times
best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards,
including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three
million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by
Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerlyanticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and
fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate
soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue
Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves. His trek across the
disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal
converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches,
both helpful and malign. At the same time, the intrepid Ada is trying
to revive her father’s derelict farm and learning to survive in a world
where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves
their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic odyssey,
hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving.
Lexile: 1210
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
by Stephen Chbosky
Standing on the fringes of life offers a unique
perspective…but there comes a time to see what it
looks like from the dance floor.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a story about
what it’s like to travel that strange course through
the uncharted territory of high school. The world
of first dates, family dramas, and new friends. Of
sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Of
those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known
as growing up.
Lexile: 720
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070
Purple Heart by Patricia McCormick
When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's
honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero.
There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a
bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow
involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just
moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces
together.
Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf,
and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his
time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was.
But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being
able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no
black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is
guilty is very complicated indeed.
Lexile: 760
TKAM: 870
Gatsby: 1070