Summer Reading!  Yippee!  So…what do I have to do?

It’s easy—and it’s important.  Summer reading programs help address an educational problem called “summer learning loss,” which you can reading more about here.  To avoid losing the skills you worked hard to earn in the last school year, you will read two books this summer:  one that is required for everyone, and one that you choose from the list provided below.  That’s only two books!  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Everyone taking English III next year will read The Great Gatsby by  F. Scott Fitzgerald and everyone taking AP Language next year will read Animal Farm by George Orwell.  AP Students must also read the provided document explaining the historical context of Animal Farm.  When you return to school in the Fall, your first writing assignment will be a literary analysis essay about this book, which will serve as my baseline writing sample for you.

For your second book, choose anything that interests you from the Student Choice list below.  You can either buy the book (new or used), or check it out from the library.  After you’ve finished reading, your job is to select one of the options from the “Summer Reading Choice Board” provided and complete the selected project before August 16, 2024, which is the end of the second week of school.  Please pay careful attention to the instructions and the rubric!  

Have a wonderful summer, and happy reading!

Ms. Fien
(wf114@abqse.org)

English III Required Text (Everyone reads this):

The Great Gatsby cover

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.

To gain a fuller appreciation of the novel (and for extra credit on your essay), read this document to learn more about the historical context of the text and its author.

Amazon - ABQ Library - Abe Books (Used)

AP Language Required Text (Everyone reads this):

Animal Farm cover

Animal Farm by George Orwell

A satirical allegorical novella first published in England on 17 August 1945. It tells the story of a group of anthropomorphic farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Because Animal Farm is an allegory, it is difficult to fully appreciate the novella without understanding the historical context.  Before reading the novella, please read this document, which will explain the historical context behind the novella and help you understand the significance of the characters.

Amazon - ABQ Library - Abe Books (Used)

Student Choice (pick ONE book from the list below):

*A note to parents: the list below contains books with a wide variety of reading levels and subjects. Our intention is to provide all students with choices that will appeal to them. If you are at all concerned about your child’s reading choices, you can use the website commonsensemedia.org for a detailed overview of the age-appropriateness of a book’s content.

The Memory Police cover

The Memory Police

by Yoko Ogawa

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Kite Runner cover

The Kite Runner

by Khaled Hosseini

Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what would happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to an Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Handmaid's Tale cover

The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

Set in dystopian New England in a patriarchal society, Offred is a handmaiden.  Deprived of her name, her family, and her freedom, she relates the circumstances that changed her life and hte lives of all women.  A thought-provoking read for 11th graders.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Under the Feet of Jesus cover

Under the Feet of Jesus

by Helena Maria

A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California’s fields. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Zookeepers' War cover

The Zookeepers' War : An Incredible True Story From The Cold War

by Jan Mohnhaupt

Living in West Berlin in the 1960s, on the other side of the Iron Curtain, East Berlin and its zoo were spacious and lush, socialist utopias where everything was perfectly planned... and then rarely completed. This quirky piece of Cold War history presents an epic tale of desperate rivalries, human follies, and an animal-mad city in which zookeeping became a way of continuing politics by other means.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Nickel Boys cover

The Nickel Boys

by Colson Whitehead

When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

Amazon - ABQ Library - Abe Books (Used)

Speak No Evil cover

Speak No Evil

by Uzodinma Iweala

When his father accidentally discovers Niru is gay, the fallout is brutal and swift. Coping with troubles of her own, however, his best friend  finds that she has little left emotionally to offer him. As the two friends struggle to reconcile their desires against the expectations and institutions that seek to define them, they find themselves speeding toward a future more violent and senseless than they can imagine.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Living Beyond Borders: Growing up Mexican in America cover

Living Beyond Borders: Growing up Mexican in America

by Margarita Langoria

In this mixed-media collection of short stories, personal essays, poetry, and comics, a celebrated group of authors shares the borders they have crossed, the struggles they have pushed through, and the two cultures they continue to navigate as Mexican Americans. Living Beyond Borders is at once an eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and hopeful love letter from the Mexican American community to today’s young readers.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Half of a Yellow Sun cover

Half of a Yellow Sun

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A novel set during Nigeria's struggle for independence in the 1960s involving five characters including thirteen-year-old Ugwu, a university professor, the professor's mistress, and a young Englishman named Richard.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Bell Jar cover

The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Parable of the Sower cover

Parable of the Sower

by Octavia Butler

When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Educated cover

Educated: A Memoir

by Tara Westover

Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag".  Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention.  Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Unfollow cover

Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving The Westboro Baptist Church

by Megan Phelps-Roper

At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. As Phelps-Roper grew up she became the church's Twitter spokeswoman. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church's leaders and message: If humans were fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs?

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Deep cover

The Deep

By Rivers Solomon

Yetu holds the memories for her people--water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners--who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly, is forgotten by everyone, save one--the historian. This demanding role has been bestowed on Yetu.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Midnight Assassin cover

The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America's First Serial Killer

by Skip Hollandsworth

A sweeping narrative history of a terrifying serial killer--America's first--who stalked Austin, Texas in 1885

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Beloved cover

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

All That Is Solid Melts into Air cover

All That Is Solid Melts into Air

by Darragh McKeon

 On a run-down apartment block in Moscow, a nine-year-old prodigy plays his piano silently for fear of disturbing the neighbors. In a factory on the outskirts of the city, his aunt makes car parts, hiding her dissident past. In a nearby hospital, a surgeon immerses himself in his work, avoiding his failed marriage. And in a village in Belarus, a teenage boy wakes to a sky of the deepest crimson. Outside, the ears of his neighbor's cattle are dripping blood. Ten miles away, at the Chernobyl Power Plant, something unimaginable has happened. Now their lives will change forever.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Power cover

The Power

by Naomi Alderman

All over the world women and girls are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain, and even death. And with this small twist of nature, everything changes drastically.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao cover

The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao 

by Junot Diaz

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in literature.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)