9th Grade LCA’s Summer Reading Requirement 2016-17
Purpose
The works of literature on the summer reading lists have been carefully selected to help prepare students for
subject matter they will encounter in their history and literature courses in the fall. Summer reading requires
independent reading outside of school, provides students with a shared experience that can serve as a reference
point for discussion and writing in the coming school year, and reinforces Lighthouse Christian Academy’s
mission to promote academic excellence.
Reading Materials
Each reading list has been designed to coincide with the history and literature curriculum of the indicated grade
level and to avoid overlap with literature that students may be assigned during the school year or may have
encountered in previous school years.
Incoming students in grades 9 through 12 will be required to read two books during the
summer: one book assigned by the faculty and one book of their choice from the reading list below. This
system allows students both structure and flexibility. Students should read unabridged, unedited editions.
Assessment/Grading
Students will be accountable for their summer reading according to teachers’ instructions. Assessments for
summer reading may include written assignments and/or oral presentations. You are required to have finished
reading before the first day of classes, but you are not required to write anything UNTIL the first week of class,
which is when we will discuss your WORKS READ and your assignments. The writing assignments will be due
about three weeks after school begins.
Fiction: (1) Character map with character descriptions (we will discuss in class the first week). (2) Plot
analysis, using Freytag’s pyramid as a reference. (3) Character analysis in relation to the roles they play and
how that helps advance the plot, theme, motifs, and lessons learned. (4) quizlet questions/test.
Nonfiction: (1) If memoir, the emotional truthfulness (2) If a biography or autobiography, the rhetorical
situation, and what was the experience, what was learned in relation to the worldview of the source? (3) If war
experiences or high-risk adventure, what were the external and internal conflicts, what were the “plot elements,”
what were the traumatic events, and what made the difference in a character’s survival? Chance, power,
intelligence, or luck? (4) Significance, Relevance according to the source.
Historical Fiction: (1) Rhetorical situation (2) How the rhetorical situation confines or liberates the writer’s
experience, voice, and tone (3) The primary conflicts and the degree to which they can or cannot be overcome.
(4) The short and long-term effects, significance, relevance, and implications for society at that time and
lingering effects or lessons for contemporary society. (5) If alternate views of history, how were things changed
as to the way they actually played out?
Policy for late enrollees
Students who enroll after August 1 are required to read one book.
9TH GRADE: All students must read Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer and at least one book from the list
below:
C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy, Screwtape Letters
George Orwell, 1984
John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Don Richardson, Peace Child
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Elizabeth Elliot, Through Gates of Splendor
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations or Hard Times
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Elie Weisel, Night
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
Catherine Marshall, Christy
Summary of Into Thin Air: On May 9, 1996, five expeditions launched an expedition to the summit of Mount
Everest. The conditions seemed perfect. Twenty-four hours later one climber had died and 23 other men and
women were caught in a desperate struggle for their lives as they battled against a ferocious storm that
threatened to tear them from the mountain. In all, eight climbers died that day in the worst tragedy Everest has
ever seen. Jon Krakauer, an accomplished climber, joined a commercial expedition run by guides for paying
clients, many of whom had little or no climbing experience. In Into Thin Air he gives a thorough and chilling
account of the ill-fated climb and reveals the complex web of decisions and circumstances that left a group of
amateurs fighting for their lives in the thin air and sub-zero cold above 26,000 feet-- a place climbers call “The
Death Zone.” Into Thin Air reveals the harsh realities of mountaineering and echoes with frantic calls of
climbers lost high on the mountain and way beyond help.
1. George Orwell,
1984.
Plot summary: Written in 1949, it remains relevant to audiences today. What happens when
government has too much power? The story takes place in 1984, which was 35 years in the future when
this novel was published. It follows Winston, a painfully average dude who works for the Ministry of
Truth, editing old newspaper articles to revise the past. Oh yeah, and love is outlawed.
2. Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women.
Plot summary: Alcott prefaces Little Women with an excerpt from John Bunyan’s seventeenth-century
work The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegorical novel about leading a Christian life. Alcott’s story begins
with the four March girls—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—sitting in their living room, lamenting their
poverty. The girls decide that they will each buy themselves a present in order to brighten their
Christmas. Soon, however, they change their minds and decide that instead of buying presents for
themselves, they will buy presents for their mother, Marmee. Marmee comes home with a letter from
Mr. March, the girls’ father, who is serving as a Union chaplain in the Civil War. The letter inspires the
girls to bear their burdens more cheerfully and not to complain about their poverty.
3. Elie Weisel,
Night (similar to a memoir: testimony, deposition, and emotional truth-telling).
Plot summary: In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupy Hungary. Not long afterward, a series of
increasingly repressive measures are passed, and the Jews of Eliezer’s town are forced into small ghettos
within Sighet. Soon they are herded onto cattle cars, and a nightmarish journey ensues. After days and
nights crammed into the car, exhausted and near starvation, the passengers arrive at Birkenau, the
gateway to Auschwitz.
4. Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations
Plot summary: Pip, a young orphan living with his sister and her husband in the marshes of Kent, sits
in a cemetery one evening looking at his parents’ tombstones. Suddenly, an escaped convict springs up
from behind a tombstone, grabs Pip, and orders him to bring him food and a file for his leg irons. Pip
obeys, but the fearsome convict is soon captured anyway. The convict protects Pip by claiming to have
stolen the items himself.
5. Charlotte Bronte,
Jane Eyre.
Plot Summary: Jane Eyre is a young orphan being raised by Mrs. Reed, her cruel, wealthy aunt. A
servant named Bessie provides Jane with some of the few kindnesses she receives, telling her stories and
singing songs to her. One day, as punishment for fighting with her bullying cousin John Reed, Jane’s
aunt imprisons Jane in the red-room, the room in which Jane’s Uncle Reed died. While locked in, Jane,
believing that she sees her uncle’s ghost, screams and faints. She wakes to find herself in the care of
Bessie and the kindly apothecary Mr. Lloyd, who suggests to Mrs. Reed that Jane be sent away to
school. To Jane’s delight, Mrs. Reed concurs.
6. John Howard Griffin,
Black Like Me.
Plot summary: John Howard Griffin, the author and main character of Black Like Me, is a middle-aged
white man living in Mansfield, Texas in 1959. Deeply committed to the cause of racial justice and
frustrated by his inability as a white man to understand the black experience, Griffin decides to take a
radical step: he decides to undergo medical treatment to change the color of his skin and temporarily
become a black man. After securing the support of his wife and of George Levitan, the editor of a blackoriented magazine called Sepia which will fund Griffin's experience in return for an article about it,
Griffin sets out for New Orleans to begin his life as a black man. He finds a contact in the black
community, a soft-spoken, articulate shoe-shiner named Sterling Williams, and begins a dermatological
regimen of exposure to ultraviolet light, oral medication, and skin dyes. Eventually, Griffin looks in the
mirror and sees a black man looking back. He briefly panics, feeling that he has lost his identity, and
then he sets out to explore the black community.
7. Don Richardson,
Peace Child.
Plot summary: This book opens up with the story of Yae, a native Sawi in Netherlands Guinea. He
strikes up what he believes to be a peace treaty with a neighboring village. However, he finds that his
new friends are only practicing the Sawi tradition of tuwi asonai man. In this practice, warriors persuade
a man to become their friend, with the intention of killing and eating him later. The more complicated
the plan, the more honorable the warrior becomes among his own village. Then, the men of the victim's
village begin to plan their revenge. Such murders exist in a cycle of violence within the Sawi culture.
8. Catherine Marshall,
Christy.
Plot summary: In the year 1912, nineteen-year-old Christy Huddleston leaves home to teach school in
the Smoky Mountains -- and comes to know and love the resilient people of the region, with their fierce
pride, their dark superstitions, their terrible poverty, and their yearning for beauty and truth. But her faith
will be severely challenged by trial and tragedy, by the needs and unique strengths of two remarkable
young men, and by a heart torn between true love and unwavering devotion.
9. James Fenimore Cooper,
The Last of the Mohicans.
Plot summary: It is the late 1750s, and the French and Indian War grips the wild forest frontier of
western New York. The French army is attacking Fort William Henry, a British outpost commanded by
Colonel Munro. Munro’s daughters Alice and Cora set out from Fort Edward to visit their father,
escorted through the dangerous forest by Major Duncan Heyward and guided by an Indian named
Magua. Soon they are joined by David Gamut, a singing master and religious follower of Calvinism.
Traveling cautiously, the group encounters the white scout Natty Bumppo, who goes by the name
Hawkeye, and his two Indian companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, the only
surviving members of the once great Mohican tribe. Hawkeye says that Magua, a Huron, has betrayed
the group by leading them in the wrong direction. The Mohicans attempt to capture the traitorous Huron,
but he escapes.