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There are many benefits of reading during the summer break that include keeping your reading skills strong; but most importantly, reading keeps your imagination in tip-top shape, stretching it with each encounter with characters and settings that a new book brings.
Required Summer Reading List & Assignments
Summer reading is required at the middle and high school levels for:
- All English/language arts classes grades 6-12
- AP U.S. History
- AP Research
- AP Seminar
- AP Art Studio
These resources can assist you in keeping your academic skills sharp during the summer months. You should definitely spend time relaxing and enjoying yourself, but keeping your mind engaged in thinking and being creative are essential.
Summer Reading Book List
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How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor
by Thomas C. Foster Year Published: 2020 ENGLISH 11 (AP only)We live in an information age, but it is increasingly difficult to know which information to trust. Fake news is rampant in mass media, stoked by foreign powers wishing to disrupt a democratic society. We need to be more perceptive, more critical, and more judicious readers. The future of our republic may depend on it.
How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor is more careful, more attentive, more aware reading. On bookstore shelves, one book looks as authoritative as the next. Online, posts and memes don’t announce their relative veracity. It is up to readers to establish how accurate, how thorough, how fair material may be.
After laying out general principles of reading nonfiction, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor offers advice for specific reading strategies in various genres from histories and biographies to science and technology to social media. Throughout, the emphasis will be on understanding writers’ biases, interrogating claims, analyzing arguments, remaining wary of broad assertions and easy answers, and thinking critically about the written and spoken materials readers encounter. We can become better citizens through better reading, and the time for that is now.How to Read Literature Like a Professor
by Thomas C. Foster Year Published: 2003 AP ENGLISH 12 (ONLY)Print, ebook & digital audiobooks available for checkout.
What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey? Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface; a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character; and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you.
In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock those hidden truths, and to discover a world where a road leads to a quest; a shared meal may signify a communion; and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just rain. Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.Frankenstein
by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Year Published: 1818 ENGLISH 12 (ALL)Print, ebook & digital audiobooks available for checkout.
Obsessed with creating life itself, Victor Frankenstein plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, which he shocks into life with electricity. But his botched creature, rejected by Frankenstein and denied human companionship, sets out to destroy his maker and all that he holds dear. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley near Byron's villa on Lake Geneva. It would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity.
Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck Year Published: 1937 ENGLISH 11 (ALL)Print, ebook & digital audiobooks available for checkout.
They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.
When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.The Hobbit
by J.R.R. Tolkien Year Published: 1937 ENGLISH 9 (ALL)Print, ebook & digital audiobooks available for checkout.
Written for J.R.R. Tolkien’s own children, The Hobbit met with instant critical acclaim when it was first published in 1937. Now recognized as a timeless classic, this introduction to the hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, Gollum, and the spectacular world of Middle-earth recounts of the adventures of a reluctant hero, a powerful and dangerous ring, and the cruel dragon Smaug the Magnificent.
Farewell to Manzanar
by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston Year Published: 1973 ENGLISH 10 (ALL)Print, ebook & digital audiobooks available for checkout.
Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old in 1942 when her family was uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar internment camp—with 10,000 other Japanese Americans. Along with searchlight towers and armed guards, Manzanar ludicrously featured cheerleaders, Boy Scouts, sock hops, baton twirling lessons and a dance band called the Jive Bombers who would play any popular song except the nation's #1 hit: "Don't Fence Me In."
Farewell to Manzanar is the true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention—and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States.Summer Reading Assignments
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AP U.S. History (APUSH)
AP US History (APUSH) Text
The American Pageant 16th ed. by Kennedy, Cohen & Bailey
Text books are available for check-out at the Front Office.