A.P. Literature and Composition Summer Reading Assignment 2014
Welcome to A.P. Literature and Composition! I’m looking forward to working with you next year. We’ll read,
discuss, and write about a pile of wonderful books. You’ll also have a chance to do some literary writing of your own.
The pace of the course will move quickly, so it’s important that you keep reading books that challenge and inspire
you over the summer.
Your summer reading assignment has two parts. Please be sure to complete both by your return on September 3.
Part 1
We will be discussing and writing about selections from a short story packet in the first week of school. Be sure
to do each of the following:
1. If you did not pick up the reading packet from me on the last day of school, please visit my website:
mcginnissof.wikispaces.com. You will find PDF files of the following short stories, which you must print:
● “Tenth of December” by George Saunders
● “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by Z.Z. Packer
● “A & P” by John Updike
● “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” by Raymond Carver
● “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J.D. Salinger
● “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin
● “The Rules of the Game” by Amy Tan
2. Annotate each story, using the following questions to focus your reading:
● Characters and their traits: What are small, identifiable moments in the story where the characters
change? Where does the writer develop deep, internal flaws or complexities in the characters?
● What emerging themes do you notice in the first five pages of the story? By the end of the story, you
should begin to articulate these themes more concretely: “Ultimately, the writer wants readers to
understand…”
● Conflict and plot: What are the truly pivotal moments in the story? What are some of the small moments
in the story that seem connected or related in some way? What problems do the characters wrestle with?
Are these problems resolved or left unresolved at the end?
3. Respond: Choose the story you found most intriguing, compelling, or satisfying. Type a 250-word response to
the following prompt:
Most narrative works (plays, short stories, novels) contain a dramatic question -- a major question that is usually
introduced at the beginning of the story and that centers on the protagonist’s central conflict. The dramatic
question propels the story forward. For example, you might argue that the central dramatic question of The Great
Gatsby is, “Will Gatsby be able to win Daisy back?” Or you could say that the novel’s central question is “Will Nick
ever uncover the real Jay Gatsby?”
What is the central dramatic question of your chosen short story? How is this question developed and resolved (or
left unresolved) over the course of the story? Be sure to include supporting details in your response.
4. Share your response with me in a Google Doc by September 3: [email protected]. Title it AP Lit Story
Response_Your last name.
Part 2
On the following page, you will find a list of suggested authors to choose from when you compile your summer
reading list. Choose three of them to read and respond to over the summer. Select at least one classic and one
contemporary book. Before the first day of school, please do the following:
1. Choose one book, and write a 250-word response to the following prompt:
The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings: “The writers, I do believe, who get the
best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral
development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events -- a marriage or a last minute rescue from
death -- but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.” To what
extent does the protagonist of your chosen novel come to new moral understanding by the end of the book? How
does this moral development -- or lack of moral growth -- contribute to the meaning of the novel as a whole? Be
sure to include supporting examples from the book in your response.
2. Share your responses with me in a Google Doc by September 3: [email protected]. Title it AP Lit
Novel Response_Your last name.
Modern and Contemporary Novels (1960 Present)
Classic Novels (1800- 1960)
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
by Milan Kundera
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel G. Marquez
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Cider House Rule by John Irving
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Ragtime by EL Doctorow
Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Sula by Toni Morrison
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
A Death in the Family by James Agee
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
What Is the What by Dave Eggers
Blindness by Jose Saramago
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea O’Breht
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Room with a View by EM Forster
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Native Son by Richard Wright
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora N. Hurston
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Emma by Jane Austen
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark
Twain
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
The Street by Ann Petry
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Light in August by William Faulkner
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
1984 by George Orwell
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Rainbow by DH Lawrence