AP LITERATURE SUMMER READING
Assessment:
Be prepared to be assessed in several ways over the required novels listed below within the
second week of school. As you read, highlight some quotes that illustrate important aspects of
the characters, themes, and issues in the book.
In addition, you need to have the following completed by the end of the second full week of
school:
• Choose one statement below. Decide to defend, challenge, or qualify your selected
statement.
Statement One:
"Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember." Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Statement Two:
"We must reform society before we can reform ourselves." George Bernard Shaw
• Write ONE essay using both texts. Your essay should reflect your thoughts,
observations, and analysis of the readings. For this essay, research is discouraged.
Your response should be original.
• Do not summarize!
• Write 3-4 full pages of typed text.
• Use MLA Times New Roman font, 12 point, 1" margins all around.
• Double space your work.
• Use the MLA format for in-text citations. You will need a Works Cited page.
• Due Date: End of the second full week of school. (September 1, 2017)
• Make sure you have saved your essay; you will need to post it to turnitin.com. We
will set this up in class.
Required Novels:
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century,
Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion
and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of
young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of
Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years. By turns
overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable
Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of
literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of
universal experience.
496 pages
AP LITERATURE SUMMER READING
Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course,
a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary
miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish
Catholic childhood.”
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent
Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no
money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he
drinks his wages. Yet Malachy — exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling — does nurture in
Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of
Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother
babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s
head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures
poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his
tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.
Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and
compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
432 pages