Pre-AP/AP Summer Reading:
All students are encouraged to read for themselves during the summer; keep your mind working, enrich your vocabulary, and continue learning about yourself and life through literature. See the list of books for college-bound students below to further guide your reading.
Pre-AP and AP reading lists: Read the required books and come to class prepared to take a test or write on them as early as the first day of class. Students are expected to take very good notes, including comments, connections, and reflection. Consider historic context and technique used by the writer to influence your understanding of the works:
Sophomore/Pre-AP
Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (Bantam Classic abridged ONLY)
Paton Cry
the Beloved Country
Junior/AP language
Chopin The Awakening
Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God
Senior/AP literature
Huxley
Brave New World
Shelley Frankenstein
Achebe Things Fall Apart
Supplemental
The following books all represent respected classics that good students read.
Parents have requested through SIC that BHS posts a list of suggested reading for college bound students. To that end, we are recommending the following works from a list provided in the preface to the Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop series used by college bound students at BHS. The writers of the vocabulary series take their vocabulary words from the works on this list, which is broken down by grade level. (This series is an excellent resource in preparation for the SAT.) Several of the novels on the list are included in our English curriculum as required reading during the class. We’ve indicated those books, because if a student has not read a book as part of a class, s/he might want to go back and fill in the blank. If you find authors you like, you can go on to read other works by them.
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Louisa May Alcott |
Little Women |
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Maya Angelou |
I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings |
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Ray Bradbury |
Fahrenheit 451 |
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Charlotte Bronte |
Jane Eyre |
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Emily Bronte |
|
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Pearl S. Buck (9) |
The Good Earth |
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Lewis Carroll |
Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland |
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Willa Cather |
My Antonia |
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Sandra Cisneros |
The House on |
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Daniel Defoe |
Robinson Crusoe |
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Charles Dickens (10) |
A Tale of Two Cities |
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Arthur Conan Doyle |
The Hound of the
Baskervilles |
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George Eliot |
Silas Marner |
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William Golding (9) |
The Lord of the
Flies |
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Frank Herbert |
Dune |
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Harper Lee (9) |
To Kill a
Mockingbird |
|
|
A Member of the
Wedding |
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Nicholasa Mohr |
El Bronx Remembered |
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Walter Dean Myers |
Fallen Angels |
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George Orwell (10) |
Animal Farm |
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Alan Paton (10) |
Cry, the Beloved
Country |
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Chaim Potok |
The |
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John Steinbeck |
The |
Level F
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Sherwood Anderson |
|
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James Baldwin |
Go Tell It on the
Mountain |
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Stephen Crane |
The Red Badge of
Courage |
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Kate Chopin (AP11) |
The Awakening |
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Ralph Ellison |
The Invisible Man |
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Louise Erdrich |
Love Medicine |
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Jack Finney |
Time and Again |
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F. Scott Fitzgerald (11) |
The Great Gatsby |
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Joseph Heller |
Catch-22 |
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Ernest Hemingway |
A Farewell to Arms |
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Zora Neale Hurston (AP11) |
Their Eyes Were
Watching God |
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (11) |
The Scarlet Letter |
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Henry James |
|
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Maxine Hong Kingston |
Woman Warrior |
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Toni Morrison |
Beloved |
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J. D. Salinger |
The Catcher in the |
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John Steinbeck (AP11) |
The Grapes of Wrath |
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Amy Tan (pre-AP 10) |
The Joy Luck Club |
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Mark Twain (11) |
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn |
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Kurt Vonnegut |
Slaughterhouse Five |
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Alice Walker |
The Color Purple |
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Edith Wharton |
The Age of
Innocence/The House of Mirth |
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Richard Wright (11) |
Black Boy |
Levels G and H
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Margaret Atwood |
The Handmaid’s Tale |
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Chinua Achebe (9) |
Things Fall Apart |
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Jane Austen (12) |
Pride and Prejudice |
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Joseph Conrad (12) |
Lord Jim/ The Heart
of Darkness |
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Charles Dickens |
David Copperfield |
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Isak Dinesen |
Out of |
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George Eliot |
The Mill on the
Floss |
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Thomas Hardy |
The Return of the
Native |
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Aldous Huxley (12) |
Brave New World |
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James Joyce |
A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man |
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
One Hundred Years of
Solitude |
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Mark Mathabone |
Kaffir Boy |
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V. S. Naipaul |
A House for Mr.
Biswas |
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Mary Shelley (12) |
Frankenstein |
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Muriel Spark |
The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie |
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Jonathan Swift |
Gulliver’s Travels |
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Virginia Woolf |
A Room of One’s
Own/To the Lighthouse |