Grade 9
No required summer reading
Grade 10
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
2014 National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Bestseller
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse,
Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his wouldbe savior,
and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes
region, risking everything for art and humanity. A novel of art, memory, and
ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the
ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Grade 11
Non-AP
The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore
Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other.
Both grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult
childhoods; both hung out on street corners with their crews; both ran into
trouble with the police. How, then, did one grow up to be a Rhodes Scholar,
decorated veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader, while the other
ended up a convicted murderer serving a life sentence? Wes Moore, the author
of this fascinating book, sets out to answer this profound question. In alternating
narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of
surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of
boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.
AP Language
Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art
of Persuasion By Jay Heinrichs
Thank You for Arguing is your master class in the art of persuasion, taught by
professors ranging from Bart Simpson to Winston Churchill. The time-tested secrets
the book discloses include Cicero’s three-step strategy for moving an audience to
action as well as Honest Abe’s Shameless Trick of lowering an audience’s
expectations by pretending to be unpolished. But it’s also replete with contemporary
techniques such as politicians’ use of “code” language to appeal to specific groups
and an eye-opening assortment of popular-culture dodges.
AND
Great American Short Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) by Paul Negri (Editor)
Featuring 19 of the finest works from the most distinguished writers in the
American short-story tradition, this new compilation begins with Nathaniel
Hawthorne's 1835 tale “Young Goodman Brown” and ranges across an entire
century, concluding with Ernest Hemingway's 1927 classic, “The Killers.” Other
selections include Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Melville's “Bartleby,” Harte's “The
Luck of Roaring Camp,” “To Build a Fire,” by Jack London, “The Real Thing” by
Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” plus stories by Mark
Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Stephen Crane, Willa
Cather, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, and others.
Grade 12
ALL summaries provided by http://www.amazon.com
Non-AP
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
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. In this book, Randy Pausch combines the humor,
inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and gives it
an indelible form.
AP Literature
The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
Moares “Moor” Zogoiby, the story’s protagonist, is a “high-born crossbreed,”
the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice merchants and crime
lords. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that
takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad
passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerised
offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. The
Moor's Last Sigh is a spectacularly ambitious, funny, satirical and compassionate
novel. It is a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah.
Man Booker Prize Best Novel Nominee/Whitbread Prize Best Novel
BHS2015-2016 Summer Reading Titles