AP Lit and Comp (Period 5 + 7)

For the 2020-2021 School year I will be teaching the AP Literature and Composition course. Many of you have come to me asking about summer reading assignments and/or projects. Here is the official list and some other fun information to think about as you bake your skin this summer with harmful UV rays. 

 

The REQUIRED Summer Reading for all seniors is the novel Walkabout by James Vance Marshall. This short novel will give us a jumping off point as we begin class together and we will do some in class writing with it early in the year. I do not recommend reading this book before August.

 

The Recommended list is much longer. As many of you know the required essays for the AP test include excerpts from a variety of literature. We can never fully predict what texts will be used on a given year, so our best approach is to be well read and to be as comfortable discussing different types of literature as possible. So given that information I am copying a list of recommended novels and plays for the test. I am asking you to all read a minimum of two additional titles. NO that does not mean find two texts that you read years ago and call it a day. Pick up a book. If you are averse to that idea you probably shouldn't be taking this class... 

 

Novels:

1984 by George Orwell

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Beowulf translated by Burton Raffel

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Daisy Miller by Henry James

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Grendel by John Gardner

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Sula by Toni Morrison

Tess of the d’Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Plague by Albert Camus

The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

 

Drama:

A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Antigone by Sophocles

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen

King Lear by William Shakespeare

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Othello by William Shakespeare

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

 

The last element is the new test breakdown for the latest version of the AP test. (We will be discussing it in much greater detail in class.) I found this very interesting: