Bloomington High School South

2024 Required Summer Reading for Honors/AP/ACP English Classes 9-12th grades 

Please note: students should have books available to them for classroom use, either on paper or electronically, when school starts. If you have trouble obtaining a copy of the book, please contact your teacher before the end of the current school year. 

9-HD

As a way to prepare for English 9 Honors and our focus on literary analysis, students enrolling in English 9 Honors are expected to read ONE NOVEL (fiction) of their choice. We recommend that students involve their parents in the book selection process. 

Students will complete an assessment of their summer reading within the first two weeks of the trimester. We may assign personal writing, an oral presentation, an analytical paper, or some other way in which students will be held accountable for the reading. 

Students are welcome to read books in either print or electronic format and may use library books, free web-based resources, or books from home. Please note that the Monroe County Public Library has novels in the following formats: print book, audio book on CD, eBook, downloadable Audiobook, and Playaways.

Students and parents may find the Monroe County Public Library’s Personalized Recommendation service helpful.  You can access it via mcpl.info 

If you have questions, please email Kristin Wintin (kwintin@mccsc.edu).

10-HD 

As a way to prepare for English 10 Honors and our focus on literary analysis, students enrolling in English 10 Honors are expected to read ONE NOVEL (fiction) of their choice that is appropriate for the rigor of an honors course at Bloomington High School South. We recommend that students involve their parents in the book selection process. English 10 content is based on world literature; therefore, we ask that students select a book that has a global connection. For example, students should select a novel that takes place outside of the United States. 

Students will complete an assessment on their summer reading within the first two weeks of the trimester. We may assign personal writing, an oral presentation, an analytical paper, or some other way in which students will be held accountable for the reading. Because students will need evidence from the text, it is important that they take notes as they read.  It will be impossible to note every significant aspect of this novel. Instead, students should try to find a balance between enjoying reading for the sake of reading and enjoying reading to help them develop analytical skills. For notes, we suggest that students focus on how literary elements (such as, character, setting, motifs) communicate a theme in the novel. Students’ original notes must be handwritten on notebook paper, sticky notes, index cards, or the like. Caveat: While there are many film adaptations of a literary work, please do not substitute watching the film for an in-depth reading of the novel.  If you decide to watch a film adaptation, write down what you notice as key similarities and differences between the novel and the film. 

Students may be tempted to use a resource like Course Hero and ChatGPT to supplement their reading; we recommend that they do so with caution or avoid them entirely.  The emphasis of the assignment will be on how students develop original and supportable ideas about a text.  

If you have questions, please see Maggie Guschwan (A219)  or Leigh Walls (A211). Please note that the Monroe County Public Library has novels in the following formats:book, audio book on CD, eBook, downloadable Audiobook, and Playaways.

AP Language and Composition (11th grade)

Students enrolling in AP Language and Composition are expected to read ONE NONFICTION BOOK from those on the list below. If you find another nonfiction book you prefer, please contact your teacher for approval first. If you have questions, you can email AP teachers Erin Crowley, Susie Shelton, James Kerr, or Kathleen Mills. Please do NOT consult an older list of authors; this list has been revised. 

Students will take an assessment on their summer reading. Teachers may assign personal writing, an oral presentation, an analytical paper, or some other way in which students will be held accountable for the reading and note-taking they completed over the summer. It is not necessary to take notes on separate paper, but marking items of note in the book, either written in or on sticky notes, is a good idea. 

• Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
• Diane Ackerman - A Natural History of the Senses
• The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander 
• Hannah Arendt - Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Sven Birkerts - The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
• William F. Buckley - Miles Gone By: A Literary Biography
• Ian Buruma - Year Zero: A History of 1945, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
• Nicolas Carr - The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us
• Rachel Carson - The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring
• Veronica Chambers (editor)- The Meaning of Michelle: 16 writers on Michelle Obama 
• Ta-Nehesi Coates—Between the World and Me
• Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene
• Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album 
• Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• W.E.B. DuBois - The Souls of Black Folk, The Talented Tenth
• Barbara Ehrenreich - Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
• Loren Eiseley - The Immense Journey: Darwin’s Century
• Ronan Farrow – Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and the Conspiracy to Protect Predators
• M. F. K. Fisher - The Art of Eating, The Gastronomical Me
• Shelby Foote - The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville, The Civil War: A Narrative  
• Thomas Friedman - The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America
• Paul Fussell - The Great War and Modern Memory, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - Colored People, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
• Atul Gawande - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
• Roxanne Gay - Bad Feminist, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
• David Grann—The Wager
• Jane Goodall - In the Shadow of Man, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
• Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, The Mismeasure of Man
• David Halberstam - The Best and the Brightest, The Breaks of the Game
• Greg Lukenianoff and Jonathan Haidt  -- The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.
• Jonathan  Haidt—The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
• Christopher Hitchens- God is Not Great, Hitch 22
• Edward Hoagland- Cat Man, The Circle Home
• Kirk Johnson- The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century 
• Pauline Kael- I Lost it at the Movies
• Patrick Radden Keefe – Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Empire of Pain 
• Tracy Kidder- Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Soul of a New Machine
• Martin Luther King, Jr.- Stride Toward Freedom
• Maxine Hong Kingston- The Woman Warrior
• Naomi Klein- No Logo, The Shock Doctrine
• Lewis Lapham- Money and Class in America, Age of Folly
• Ursula LeGuin- No Time to Spare
• Barry Lopez-Arctic Dreams, Of Wolves and Men
• Bill McKibben- The End of Nature, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
• John McPhee- Annals of the former world, Coming into the country
• N. Scott Momaday- House made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain
• Sy Montgomery-The Soul of an Octopus 
• Siddhartha Mukherjee- The Emperor of all Maladies
• Susan Orlean-The Library Book 
• Matt Parker—Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
• Steven Pinker- Enlightenment Now, The Better Angels of our Nature
• Michael Pollan- Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, How To Change Your Mind 
• Francine Prose-Reading like a Writer
• Richard Rodriguez- Darling, Brown
• Carl Sagan: Cosmos, Pale Blue Dot
• Scott Russell Sanders, A Private History of Awe, Hunting for Hope, A Conservationist Manifesto
• T.M. Scanlon – What We Owe One Another 
• A.O. Scott- Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art 
• Simon Schama- The Power of Art, Landscape and Memory
• Leslie Marmom Silko- Ceremony, Almanac of the dead
• Clint Smith - How the Word is Passed 
• Susan Sontag - On Photography
• Bryan Stevenson—Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption 
• Jesmyn Ward – Men We Reaped 

W131 ACP (12th grade) 

Students should email W131 teachers Erin Crowley, Lauren Mark, or Susie Shelton with questions. 

No book assigned. An article will be distributed the first week of the course.

AP Literature and Composition (12th grade)

Students should read AT LEAST one of the paired sets of novels below (that is, a minimum of two novels). Students are encouraged to read more than one pairing. See AP Lit. teachers Ian Rickerby or Sheila McDermott-Sipe with questions. 

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Native Son by Richard Wright

King Lear by William Shakespeare and Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Beloved by Toni Morrison