English Honors9 Reading List
You may not read books more than once for credit
(for summer reading, for class study, and/or for Reading Workshop).
You must read three (3) books from this list. You will complete “My Reader’s
Journal” for these three (3) books. Due on Monday, August 17.
The following is a list of suggested reading for college-bound students. My suggestion for you is to select a book based on one or more of
these three criteria: your knowledge of the author, a skimming of the book (read the cover or jacket, a bit of the beginning, and a portion somewhere
in the middle.), or advice of others who have recommended the book.
You may pick up most of these books at your local library or the Norwell Library Media Center. You may also purchase them at your local
bookstores—it’s sometimes nice to have your own copy so that you can write in the book. Several of these books are also available as ebooks. If
you have an ereader and your parents don’t mind purchasing the book, I would suggest this format. (Ebooks increase vocabulary because they allow
the user to easily look up definitions in context.)
I cannot promise that all the books on this list will be free of objectionable material. What is objectionable to one may not be objectionable
to another. Choose wisely.
Achebe, Chinua
Adams, Douglas
Agee, James
Aidinoff , Elsie V.
Alexie, Sherman
Allende, Isabel
Anderson, Laurie Halse
Asimov, Isaac
Atwood, Margaret
Austen, Jane
Bacigalupi, Paolo
Baldwin, James
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
FICTION
A Man of the People/Arrow of God/Things Fall Apart
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Death in the Family
The Garden
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Island Beneath the Sea/Daughter of Fortune
Twisted
The End of Eternity/The Last Man on Earth/The Gods Themselves/Foundations
The Handmaid’s Tale
Emma/Pride and Prejudice/Sense and Sensibility/Mansfield Park
Ship Breaker
Go Tell It on the Mountain/If Beale Street Could Talk
Deb Shumaker
Block, Francesca Lia
Box, C.J.
Bradbury, Ray
Bronte, Charlotte
Bronte, Emily
Brown, Dan
Buck, Pearl S.
Bunyan, John
Burns, Olive Ann
Butler, Octavia
Camus, Albert
Caletti, Deb
Card, Orson Scott
Cather, Willa
Cervantes, Miguel de
Childress, Mark
Clarke, Arthur C.
Clark, Walter Van T.
Cline, Ernest
Coben, Harlan
Conrad, Joseph
Cooper, James Fenimore
Conroy, Pat
Crane, Stephen
Crichton, Michael
Dashner, James
De Maurier, Daphne
Defoe, Daniel
Deuker, Cark
Dickens, Charles
Dillard, Annie
Doctorow, E.L.
Donnelly, Jennifer
Dreiser, Theodore
Dumas, Alexander
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Weetzie Bat
Any novel
Fahrenheit 451/Martian Chronicles
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
The Da Vinci Code
The Good Earth
The Pilgrim’s Progress
Cold Sassy Tree
Kindred
The Stranger/The Plague
The Story of Us
Ender's Game
Death Comes for the Archbishop/My Antonia/O Pioneers!
Don Quixote
Crazy in Alabama
2001: A Space Odyssey/2010: Odyssey 2/2061: Odyssey 3/ 3001: The Final Odyssey
The Ox-Bow Incident
Ready Player One
Fade Away/Any of his novels
Lord Jim
The Last of the Mohicans/The Prairie
The Prince of Tides/ South of Broad/ The Lords of Discipline
The Red Badge of Courage
Prey/Next/The Andromeda Strain/Sphere
The Maze Runner
Rebecca
Robinson Crusoe/Moll Flanders
Runner
Bleak House/David Copperfield/A Tale of Two Cities/Great Expectations
An American Childhood
Ragtime
A Northern Light
An American Tragedy/Sister Carrie
The Count of Monte Cristo/The Three Muskateers
Deb Shumaker
Eliot, George
Ellison, Ralph
Emshwiller, Carol
Erdrich, Louise
Faulkner, William
Fielding, Henry
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Flagg, Fannie
Flinn, Alex
Forman, Gayle
Forster, E.M.
Frazier, Charles
Frost, Helen
Gaines, Ernest
Garcia-Marquez, Gabriel
Garden Nancy
Garnder, John
Golden, Arthur
Green, John
Greene, Graham
Grisham, John
Gruen, Sara
Hale, Shannon
Hardy, Thomas
Hart, John
Haruf, Kent
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Haynes, Dana
Hegi, Ursula
Hemingway, Ernest
Heller, Joseph
Herbert, Frank
Hesse, Hermann
Homer
Hosseini, Khaled
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Middlemarch/The Mill on the Floss/Silas Marner
Invisible Man
The Mount
The Beet Queen/Love Medicine/Tracks
Absalom, Absalom!/ As I Lay Dying/Light in August/The Sound and the Fury
Joseph Andrews/Tom Jones
The Last Tycoon/Tender is the Night/This Side of Paradise/The Great Gatsby
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café/Standing in the Rainbow
Fade to Black
If I Stay
A Passage to India/A Room with a View/Howard’s End
Cold Mountain
Keesha's House
A Lesson Before Dying/The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Love in the Time of Cholera/One Hundred Years of Solitude
Endgame
Grendel
Memoirs of a Geisha
Looking for Alaska (or any of his novels)
Brighton Rock/The Quiet American/The Heart of the Matter/The Power and the Fury
A Time to Kill
Water for Elephants
The Goose Girl/Enna Burning/or any of the four Books of Bayern
Mayor of Casterbridge/The Return of the Native/Tess of the D’Ubervilles
The Last Child
Plainsong
The House of Seven Gables
Crashers
Stones from the River/Salt Dancers/Intrusions
A Farewell to Arms/For Whom the Bell Tolls/The Sun Also Rises
Catch-22/Closing Time: The Sequel to Catch-22/Something Happened
Dune
Siddhartha
The Odyssey (in its entirety)/The Iliad (in its entirety)
The Kite Runner/A Thousand Splendid Suns
Deb Shumaker
Hugo, Victor
Hurston, Zora Neal
Huxley, Aldous
Irving, John
James, Henry
Joyce, James
Kafka, Franz
Klavan, Andrew
Kantor, MacKinlay
Kesey, Ken
Keyes, Daniel
Kidd, Sue Monk
Kingsolver, Barbara
Korman, Gordon
LaFevers, R. L.
Larsson, Stieg
Lawrence, D.H.
Letts, Billie
Lewis, Sinclair
Lockhart, E.
London, Jack
Lu, Marie
Lutz, Lisa
McCullers, Carson
Mailer, Norman
Mann, Thomas
Martinez, Jessica
Maugham, Somerset
McDonald, Abby
McMurtry, Larry
Melville, Herman
Meyer, Stephenie
Miller, Mary Beth
Mitchell, Margaret
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Les Miserables/Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
Their Eyes Were Watching God/Mules and Men
Brave New World
A Prayer for Owen Meany/The Cider House Rules
The Ambassadors/The Portrait of a Lady/The Turn of the Screw/The American/
Daisy Miller
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man/The Dubliners/Ulysses
The Trial/ The Metamorphosis
The Last Thing I Remember
Andersonville
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest/Sometimes a Great Notion
Flowers for Algernon
The Secret Life of Bees
The Poisonwood Bible/The Bean Trees
The Juvie Three
Grave Mercy
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or any of the books in the triology)
Lady Chatterley’s Lover/Sons and Lovers
Where the Heart Is/Shoot the Moon/ The Honk and Holler Opening Soon/Made in the U.S.A.
Babbitt/Main Street/Arrowsmith
We Were Liars
The Call of the Wild
Legend
The Spellman Files
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Naked and the Dead
Death in Venice
Virtuosity
Of Human Bondage
Getting Over Garrett Delaney
Anything for Billy/The Crossing/Lonesome Dove
Moby Dick/Billy Budd
The Host
Aimee
Gone with the Wind
Deb Shumaker
Momaday, N. Scott
Morrison, Toni
Murdock, Catherine Gilbert
Ness, Patrick
Nix, Garth
O’Brien, Tim
Orwell, George
O’Connor, Flannery
Paton, Alan
Patterson, James
Pearson, Mary E.
Plath, Sylvia
Porter, Katherine Ann
Potok, Chaim
Pratchett, Terry
Proulx, E. Annie
Rand, Ayn
Remarque, Enrich Maria
Rolvaag, O.E.
Roth, Veronica
Rowell, Rainbow
Salinger, J.D.
Satrapi, Marjane
Scheres, Julia
Shusterman Neal
Shaara, Michael
Silko, Leslie Marmon
Sinclair, Upton
Soto, Gary
Sparks, Beatrice
Steinbeck, John
Stephenson, Neal
Stockett, Kathryn
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Swift, Jonathan
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
House Made of Dawn
The Bluest Eye/Song of Solomon/Sula/Tar Baby/Paradise/Beloved
Dairy Queen
The Knife of Never Letting Go
Sabriel
The Things They Carried/Nuclear Age/Going After Cacciato
1984/Animal Farm
Wise Blood/A Good Man is Hard to Find
Cry, the Beloved Country/Too Late the Phalarope
The Angel Experiment/Any of the Maximum Ride Series
The Adoration of Jenna Fox
The Bell Jar
Pale Horse, Pale Rider/Ship of Fools
My Name Is Asher Lev/The Chosen/Davita’s Harp
Good Omens
The Shipping News/Postcards
Anthem/The Fountainhead/The Romantic Manifesto/We the Living/Atlas Shrugged
All Quiet on the Western Front
Giants in the Earth
Divergent/Insurgent/Allegiant
Eleanor & Park
Catcher in the Rye
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Jesusland
Unwind
Killer Angels/Gods and Generals/Rise to Rebellion
Ceremony
The Jungle
Buried Onions
Go Ask Alice
The Grapes of Wrath/Of Mice and Men/East of Eden/Cannery Row
Snow Crash
The Help
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Gulliver’s Travels
Deb Shumaker
Tan, Amy
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Tolkien, J.R.R.
Tolstoy, Leo (Tolstoi)
Trumbo, Dalton
Turgenev, Ivan
Twain, Mark
Updike, John
Voltaire
Vonnegut, Kurt
Yancey, Rick
Walker, Alice
Warren, Robert Penn
Wells, H.G.
Westerfeld, Scott
Wharton, Edith
White, T.H.
Wilde, Oscar
Wister, Owen
Wolf, Jennifer Shaw
Wolfe, Thomas
Woolfe, Virginia
Wright, Richard
Wroblewski, David
Zarr, Sara
Zusak, Markus
The Joy Luck Club/The Bonesetter’s Daughter/The Hundred Secret Senses/The Kitchen God’s Wife
Vanity Fair
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings series
Anna Karenina/War and Peace/The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Johnny Got His Gun
Fathers and Sons
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Rabbit, Run
Candide
Slaughterhouse Five
The 5th Wave
The Color Purple
All the King’s Men
The Invisible Man/The War of the Worlds
Uglies Trilogy (must read all three)
The Age of Innocence/Ethan Frome/The House of Mirth
The Once and Future King
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Virginian
Breaking Beautiful
Look Homeward, Angel
Mrs. Dalloway/To the Lighthouse
Native Son
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Story of a Girl
The Book Thief
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NONFICTION
Abbott, Karen
Angelou, Maya
Barry, John M.
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes/Singing and Swinging and Getting Merry Like Christmas/The Heart
of a Woman/A Song Flung Up to Heaven/I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Deb Shumaker
Brown, Dee
Bryson, Bill
Bruchac, Joseph
Canada, Geoffrey
Capote, Truman
Chang, Pang-Mei Natasha
Churchill, Sir Winston
Cullen, Dave
Darwin, Charles
Delany, Sarah and A. Elizabeth
Didion, Joan
Dillard, Annie
Downham, Jenny
Eggers, Dave
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Fishman, Charles
Freud, Sigmund
Gladwell, Malcolm
Gottlieb, Lori
Griffin, John Howard
Gunther, John
Hegi, Ursula
Hersey, John
Hillenbrand, Laura
Jiang, Ji-li
Jones, Howard
Junger, Sebastian
Karr, Mary
Kimmel, Haven
Kingsolver, Barbara
Krakauer, Jon
Larson, Erik
Levitt, Steven D.
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
A Walk in the Woods/Lost Continent/Neither Here Nor There/I’m a Stranger Here Myself/In a Sunburned
Country
Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War Two
Fist Stick Knife Gun
In Cold Blood
Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir
Blood, Sweat, and Tears
Columbine
Origin of the Species
Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years
Slouching Towards Bethlehem/Miami/Play It as It Lays
For the Time Being, Teaching a Stone to Talk (essay collections)
You Against Me
Zeitoun
The American Scholar
The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the
American Economy
Civilization and Its Discontents
The Tipping Point/Blink
Stick Figure
Black Like Me
Death Be Not Proud
Tearing the Silence: On Being German in America
Hiroshima
Seabiscuit: An American Legend/ Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption
Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution
Mutiny on the Amistad
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea/Fire
The Liars’ Club: A Memoir/Cherry
A Girl Named Zippy
High Tide in Tuscon/Small Wonder (essay collections)
Into the Thin Air
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Deb Shumaker
Machiavelli, Niccolo
Malcolm X
Mahmoody, Betty
Mailer, Norman
Marx, Karl
Mathabane, Mark
McBride, James
McCourt, Frank
Momaday, N. Scott
Neihardt, John G.
Nelson, Pete and Hunter Scott
O’Brien, Tim
Plato
Potok, Chaim
Preston, Richard
Rhodes, Richard
Runyon, Brent
Schlosser, Eric
Sheff, David
St. John, Warren
Steinbeck, John
Tebow, Tim
Ung, Loung
Vaught, Susan
Williams, Gregory Howard
Wolfe, Tom
Wright, Richard
The Prince
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Not Without My Daughter
Executioner’s Song
Communist Manifesto
Kaffir Boy
The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir/’Tis
The Man Made of Words (essay collection)
Black Elk Speaks
Left for Dead: A Young Man's Search for Justice for the USS Indianapolis
If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Republic
Wanderings/The Gates of November
The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story/
Deadly Feasts: Tracking The Secrets Of A Terrifying New Plague
The Burn Journals
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Beautiful Boy
Outcasts United: the Story of a Refugee Soccer Team That Changed a Town
Travels with Charlie
Through my Eyes
First They Killed My Father
Trigger/Going Underground,/Freaks Like Us/Big Fat Manifesto
Life on the Color Line
The Right Stuff
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth
*Note: Your book, regardless whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, should be an appropriate reading level (grade level or higher) and one not read in any
other class in the middle school.
Eng9HSummerReadingLists
Deb Shumaker