Ballard High School
Junior/Senior Summer Reading 2016
All-Junior Read
The Good Thief/Hannah Tinti
Twelve year-old Ren is missing his left hand. How it was lost is a mystery that Ren has been trying to solve for his entire
life, as well as who his parents are, and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage for boys.
When a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be Ren’s long-lost brother, his convincing tale of how
Ren lost his hand persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy and to give Ren some hope. But is Benjamin
really who he says he is?
AP Juniors
Please select one non-fiction book from the selections below.
Pinstripes and Pearls: The Women of the Harvard Law School Class of ‘64/Stephen Bryer, et al.
To illustrate the challenges facing women of her generation, author Judith Richards Hope describes the lives and
careers of a handful of barrier-breaking women, including herself, from Harvard Law School's pivotal class of 1964,
who fought and overcame preconceptions and prejudices against their entering what, at the time, was a male
vocation. Despite their struggles in law school and in the workplace, they maintained their ambition and ultimately
achieved remarkable success. They look back on law school as a time of enormous personal and intellectual growth.
An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War that Came Between Us/James Carroll
An American Requiem is the story of one man's coming of age. But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the
conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political, and religious.
An American Childhood/Annie Dillard
Memories of childhood (doing what you do out of a private passion for the thing itself)
The Rage of a Privileged Class/Ellis Close
A controversial and widely heralded look at the prejudice encountered by the most respected, best educated, and
wealthiest members of the black community.
Fever Pitch/Nick Hornby
In America, it is soccer. But in Great Britain, it is the real football. No pads, no prayers, no prisoners. And that’s
before the players even take the field.
Nick Hornby has been a football fan since the moment he was conceived. Call it pre-destiny. Or call it pre-school.
Fever Pitch is his tribute to a lifelong obsession. Part autobiography, part comedy, part incisive analysis of insanity,
Hornby’s award-winning memoir captures the fever pitch of fandom—its agony and ecstasy, its community, its
defining role in thousands of young men’s coming-of-age stories. Fever Pitch is one for the home team. But above all,
it is one for everyone who knows what it really means to have a losing season.
All Souls/Michael Patrick MacDonald
All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest
concentration of white poverty in America. The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston’s working
class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave.
The threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and
poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain
could still be “the best place in the world.”
The Hunger of Memory/Richard Rodriguez
Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic
success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of
“making it” in middle-class America.
Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political
statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling
to become a man.
The Content of our Character: A New Vision of Race in America/Shelby Steele
In this controversial essay collection, award-winning writer Shelby Stelle illuminates the origins of the current conflict
in race relations--the increase in anger, mistrust, and even violence between black and whites. With candor and
persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color
before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them. The
Content of Our Character is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but an honest, courageous look at America's most
enduring and wrenching social dilemma.
Senior Summer Reading List
Honors/Comp: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture." Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what
matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we
impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to
imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving
Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of
others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think").
It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
AP: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd AND How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
The Secret Life of Bees was a New York Times bestseller for more than two and a half years, a Good Morning America “Read
This” Book Club pick and was made into an award-winning film starring Dakota Fanning, Queen Latifah, Jennifer Hudson, and
Alicia Keys. A coming of age tale set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life
has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed.
When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the town’s most vicious racists, Lily decides they
should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina—a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. There they are taken in by
an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black
Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming
power of love—a story that women will continue to share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster’s classic guide—a lively and entertaining introduction to
literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes and contexts, that shows you how to make your everyday reading
experience more rewarding and enjoyable. While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper
literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths
by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes-of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.