Compliments of Ms Halfpenny Wed. 21 June
English IB A1 – Summer Reading List
This is designed to be a fun reading list – not based on the actual IBH course, but giving suggestions of reading which can entertain, as well as
improving your imagination and vocabulary! Read as widely as you can for success, but don’t read anything you hate – skim
read before buying!
What follows on the other side is a short list of good reading in a variety of genres.
As an outside source you could think about researching Nobel Prize winners for respected writers form all over the world. I find the Booker
Prize candidates and winners almost always readable. For more information you could start at the Wikipedia site which has a comprehensive list
at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_and_shortlisted_authors_of_the_Booker_Prize_for_Fiction
Using film.
When I was a student I was bad at history and had only a very vague idea about historical periods. If you have a similar affliction, it would be
worthwhile to give yourself a stress-free visual impression of different eras. Check out the fashions, the architecture, forms of transport etc.
Here are suggestions of DVDs you could hire.
Medieval
Renaissance
18th century
Early 19th
century
Later 19th
century
WWI
Early 20th
century
1940s
The Reckoning – a mystery story, set in the medieval period with insight into early English drama
The Seventh Seal – the classic directed by Ingmar Bergman
Elizabeth starring Kate Blanchett – but don’t take it as a historical document!
And, yes if you must, Shakespeare in Love or better the Elizabethan episodes of Blackadder!
Dangerous Liaisons –based on the famous, scandalous epistolary novel (not for the very conservative)
Barry Lyndon – Kubrick’s picturesque masterpiece based on Thackeray’s novel
Restoration based on the Rose Tremain novel
Vatel starring Gerard Depardieu, Uma Thurman and Tim Roth – intrigues and formal gardens
Films based on Jane Austen novels, especially Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility
Immortal Beloved based on the life of Beethoven
Frankenstein directed by Kenneth Branagh gives good insight into Romantic period values and the Gothic tradition
Mrs Brown – starring Judy Dench and based on Queen Victoria
The Leopard splendidly directed by Visconti based on the novel by Lampedusa set in Sicliy in the 1860s
- anything based on a 19th century novel e.g. Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Great Expectations, Germinal
Gallipoli – based on the Anzac troops fighting in Turkey
Oh, What a Lovely War – the musical satire
Gosford Park directed by Robert Altman
The Remains of the Day based on the Kazuo Ishiguro novel – both set in grand country households
Watch a film noir with Humphrey Bogart like The Maltese Falcon or the wonderfully quirky Steve Martin film: Dead
Men Don’t Wear Plaid
Hire and watch a few Shakespeare plays just to get a sense of what they are like in performance.
It is always worth reading some non-fiction to broaden one’s mind. Here are some suggestions with brief information.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Jean-Dominique Bauby – autobiography by a man suddenly and completely paralysed
Paula – Isabel Allende – letters the author wrote to her daughter
The Greek Islands – Lawrence Durrell – seminal travel book
e.g. Crusader / The Ulysses Voyage – Tim Severin very readable travel writing with a historical angle
The Songlines - Bruce Chatwin – anecdotal travel writing with intriguing insights on the Aborigine view of geography (good for TOK!)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat - Oliver Sacks – understanding the way the brain works using numerous anecdotes (good for TOK!)
Homage to Catalonia / Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell – classic autobiographical experiences of the Spanish Civil War and
poverty
Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston – the famous experiences of the solo climber who got trapped and…. (You can read the first
chapters at the Guardian site http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1315388,00.html)
Wild Swans – Jung Chang’s history of change in China experienced by three generations of women
Red Azalea – Anchee Min’s autobiography on growing up in the Chinese Cultural revolution
A Mad World My Masters – BBC reporter John Simpson’s travel anecdotes
Touching The Void – Joe Simpson – award-winning true story of mountaineer’s near-death adventure
Compliments of Ms Halfpenny Wed. 21 June
Oranges are not the only Fruit
The Joy Luck Club
The Colour Purple
The Catcher in the Rye
Cat’s Eye
The Bell Jar
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Mister Pip
Consider Phlebus / Feersum Endjinn
The Mona Lisa Overdrive / Virtual Light / Neuromancer
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / A Scanner Darkly
Dune
Slaughterhouse 5
The Illustrated Man etc.
The Cyberiad, Tales of Pirx the Pilot / Return from the Stars
Perelandra (a.k.a. Voyage to Venus) / That Hideous Strength
The War of the Worlds / The Invisible Man / The Time Machine
Never Let Me Go
A Clockwork Orange
The Handmaid’s Tale
Fahrenheit 451
Brave New World
Nineteen-Eighty-Four
We
Fatherland
The Riddle of the Sands
The Secret Agent
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Ashenden
The Confidential Agent/The Human Factor/The Quiet American
Casino Royale etc.
Tinker, Tailor, Solder, Spy etc.
The Company / The Sisters / Mother Russia
The Famished Road / Astonishing the Gods
Chronicle of a Death Foretold / One Hundred Years of Solitude
State of War
The New Passion of Eve / The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories
The House of Spirits
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
The Powerbook / Art & Lies / Gut Symmetry / Written on the Body
Juggling
The Debt to Pleasure
Good Behaviour
The Third Policeman
The Deptford Trilogy
Cold Comfort Farm
Catch 22
e.g. The Best a Man Can Get / May Contain Nuts
A Short History of Tractors In Ukrainian
Decline and Fall / Scoop / Vile Bodies
Carry On, Jeeves etc.
The Sultan’s Seal / The Abyssinian Proof / The Winter Thief
e.g. The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy Gallowglasss
e.g. Ratking, Vendetta, A Rich Full Death
e.g. The Echo / The Ice House / The Scold’s Bridle
The Sunday Philosophy Club / No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Fingersmith
The Quincunx
Cold Heaven
Jeanette Winterson
Amy Tan
Alice Walker
J.D Salinger
Margaret Attwood
Sylvia Plath
James Joyce
Lloyd Jones
Iain M. Banks
William Gibson
Philip K. Dick
Frank Herbert
Kurt Vonnegut
Ray Bradbury
Stanislaw Lem
C. S. Lewis
H. G. Wells
Kazuo Ishiguro
Anthony Burgess
Margaret Atwood
Ray Bradbury
Aldous Huxley
George Orwell
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Robert Harris
Robert Erskine Childers
Joseph Conrad
John Buchan
W. Somerset Maugham
Graham Greene
Ian Fleming
John Le Carré
Robert Littell
Ben Okri
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ninochka Rosca
Angela Carter
Isabel Allende
Haruki Murakami
Jeanette Winterson
Barbara Trapido
John Lanchester
Molly Keene
Flann O’Brien
Robertson Davies
Stella Gibbons
Joseph Heller
John O’Farrell
Marina Lewycka
Evelyn Waugh
P. G. Wodehouse
Jenny White
Barbara Vine
Michael Dibdin
Minette Walters
Alexander McCall Smith
Sarah Waters
Charles Palliser
Brian Moore
Coming of age
Science fiction
Dystopia
Espionage
Magic realism
Humorous
Mystery novels
(Not for the faint of
heart!)
Compliments of Ms Halfpenny Wed. 21 June
The Long Goodbye / The Big Sleep
The Maltese Falcon
The Moonstone / The Woman in White
The Monk
Melmoth the Wanderer
Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner
Frankenstein
The Scarlet Letter
Trilby
The Fall of the House of Usher/ The Pit & the Pendulum
The Picture of Dorian Grey
The Turn of the Screw
Uncle Silas / In a Glass Darkly (especially ‘Camilla’)
Dracula
The Historian
Let the Right One In
Interview with a Vampire
Morality Play (medieval)
The Birth of Venus (Renaissance Florence)
Restoration
The Leopard (Risorgimento / Unification of Italy 1860s)
Oscar & Lucinda / The True History of the Kelly Gang / Parrot &
Olivier in America etc. (19th century)
Birdsong (WWI)
The Wars (WWI)
The Things They Carried (Vietnamese War)
Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Hammett
Wilkie Collins
Matthew Lewis
Charles Maturin
James Hogg
Mary Shelley
Nathaniel Hawthorne
George du Maurier
Edgar Allen Poe
Oscar Wilde
Henry James
Sheridan le Fanu
Bram Stoker
Elisabeth Kostova
John Avide Lindqvist
Anne Rice
Barry Unsworth
Sarah Dunant
Rose Tremayne
Giuseppe di Lampedusa
Peter Carey
Moll Flanders / Roxanne
Wuthering Heights
Frankenstein
The Turn of the Screw/ Daisy Miller
Pride and Prejudice
Oliver Twist / Hard Times / Great Expectations
Silas Marner
The Scarlet Letter / Short Stories
A Room with a View / Where Angels Fear to tread
Brideshead Revisited
The Alexandria Quartet
e.g. Beloved / Paradise / Song of Solomon
The Remains of the Day / An Artist of the Floating World
The English Patient
A Suitable Boy
Birdsong
Fugitive Pieces
Eugene Onegin
A Hero of Our Time
First Love
Crime & Punishment / The Idiot / The Brothers Karamazov
Anna Karenina
Short stories and plays
A Singular Hostage/ The Beggar at the Gate
A Suitable Boy
Staying On / The Raj Quartet (The Jewel in the Crown etc.)
Midnight’s Children
The God of Small Things
The Siege of Krishnapur
A Passage to India
Plain Tales from the Hills
Black Rain
Daniel Defoe
Emile Brontë
Mary Shelley
Henry James
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Nathaniel Hawthorne
E. M. Forster
Evelyn Waugh
Laurence Durrell
Toni Morrison
Kazuo Ishiguro
Michael Ondaatje
Vikram Seth
Sebastian Faulks
Anne Michaelis
Alexander Pushkin
Mikhail Lermontov
Ivan Turgenev
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Leo Tolstoy
Anton Chekhov
Thalassa Ali
Vikram Seth
Paul Scott
Salman Rushdie
Arundhati Roy
J. G. Farrell
E. M. Forster
Rudyard Kipling
Masuji Ibuse
Gothic
Vampire
Historical novels
Sebastian Faulkes
Timothy Findley
Tim O’Brien
Accessible 19th century
classics
Accessible 20th century
classics
Russian
Indian continent
Japanese
Compliments of Ms Halfpenny Wed. 21 June
Snow Country / Thousand Cranes
The Makioka Sisters
Rashomon
The Sailor who Fell from Grace with the Sea/ Sound of Waves
The Woman in the Dunes
Norwegian Wood / Dance, Dance, Dance
An Artist of the Floating World
Kitchen / The Lake
Strangers
Three Views of Crystal Water
Yasunari Kawabata
Junchiro Tanizaki
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Yukio Moshima
Kobo Abe
Haruki Murakami
Kazuo Ishiguro
Banana Yoshimoto
Taichi Yamada
Katherine Govier
The Mask of Apollo / The King Must Die /The Bull From the Sea
Achilles
The Penelopeiad
The Songs of the Kings
Ransom
Troy
Troy / The First Man in Rome / The Grass Crown/ Fortune’s
Favourites
Pompei / Imperium / Lustrum
Under the Eagle / The Eagle’s Tongue/ Where the Eagle Hunts etc.
I, Claudius / Claudius the God
Ovid / Germanicus / Sejanus etc. (Marcus Corvinus mysteries)
The Silver Pigs / Shadows in Bronze etc. (Marcus Didius Falco
series)
Roman Blood / Arms of Nemesis etc. (Gordianus the Finder series)
Ulysses
Beowulf
The Song of Roland
El Cid
The Odyssey
The Iliad
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Canterbury Tales – choose from
The Wife of Bath
The Miller’s Tale
The Franklin’s Tale
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
Poems (the inventor of the sonnet)
The Inferno
The Decameron
The Prince
Mary Renault
Madeleine Miller
Margaret Atwood
Barry Unsworth
David Malouf
Peter Ackroyd
Colleen McCulloch
Robert Harris
Simon Scarrow
Robert Graves
David Wishart
Lindsey Davis
Steven Saylor
James Joyce
The Spanish Tragedy
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus
The Changeling
Volpone / The Alchemist
Set in Japan, Canadian
writer
Ancient Greece and
Rome connections
Epic
Geoffrey Chaucer
- most have a bawdy element;
the last is a beast fable
Medieval
Francisco Petrarch
Dante
Boccaccio
Niccolo Machiavelli
Renaissance Italy
Thomas Kyd
Christopher Marlowe
Thomas Middleton and William
Rowley
Ben Jonson
Contemporaries of
Shakespeare