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 entering 12th grade next year will read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway.  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!

Mr. Wood
(zwood@abqse.org)

Required Text: (Everyone reads this):

The Old Man and the Sea cover

The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway wrote this novelette in 1951 during his stay in Cuba. A year later, the novel was published in America, bringing a sort of revolution in the field of fiction writing. The story follows an aging Cuban professional fisherman who fails to fish due to his age; However, in his last attempt, he hooks rather a giant marlin, testing his strength, resilience, expertise, and perseverance beyond his natural abilities.

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.

Exhalation cover

Exhalation : Stories

by Ted Chiang

In this fantastical and elegant collection of short stories, Ted Chiang wrestles with the oldest questions on earth--What is the nature of the universe? What does it mean to be human?--and ones that no one else has even imagined. And, each in its own way, the stories prove that complex and thoughtful science fiction can rise to new heights of beauty, meaning, and compassion.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Things in Jars cover

Things in Jars

by Jess Kidd

In the dark underbelly of Victorian London, a formidable female sleuth is pulled into the macabre world of fanatical anatomists and crooked surgeons while investigating the kidnapping of an extraordinary child in this gothic mystery

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Voyrages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black

Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black

by Marcus Sedgwick, Julian Sedgwick, Alexis Deacon

Harry Black, a conscientious objector, artist, and firefighter battling the blazes of German bombing in London in 1944, wakes in the hospital to news that his soldier brother, Ellis, has been killed. In the delirium of his wounded state, driven by visions of Ellis still alive and a sense of poetic inevitability, Harry sets off on a search for his brother that will lead him deep into the city's Underworld.

Amazon - ABQ Library (eBook) - 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)

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Rule of the Bone

by Russell Banks

The story of a troubled fourteen-year-old boy who, upon leaving an abusive homelife, lives on the edge of society, struggling to find himself.

Amazon - AbeBooks (Used)

The Butchering Art cover

The Butchering Art : Joseph Lister's Quest To Transform The Grisly World Of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Historian Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875 with the help an unlikely figure: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who methods changed the course of history.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

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Spying on Whales: the Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures

by Nick Pyenson

Nick Pyenson's research has given us the answers to some of our biggest questions about whales. He takes us deep inside the Smithsonian's unparalleled fossil collections, to frigid Antarctic waters, and to the arid desert in Chile, where scientists race against time to document the largest fossil whale site ever found

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Dracula cover

Dracula

by Bram Stoker

Having discovered the double identity of the wealthy Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula, a small group of people vow to rid the world of the evil vampire.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Picture of Dorian Gray cover

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

A wealthy English gentleman trades his soul to remain eternally young while his portrait ages.

Amazon - ABQ Library (eBook) - AbeBooks (Used)

The Underground Railroad cover

The Underground Railroad

by Colson Whitehead

Follow the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as a rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Water Dancer cover

The Water Dancer

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram wasrobbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiramalmost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births anurgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Testaments cover

The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

Little Weirds cover

Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

To see the world through Slate’s eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. Heartbreak, confusion, and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time.

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)

A Clockwork Orange cover

Clockwork Orange

By Anthony Burgess

In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society.

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)

All The Pretty Horses cover

All the Pretty Horses

by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses is a poignant tale set in the American Southwest during the mid-20th century. The story follows John Grady Cole, a young Texan who embarks on a journey with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, to seek adventure and a sense of freedom. They set out on horseback into the rugged landscape of Mexico, where they encounter both beauty and danger.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)

The Glass Castle cover

The Glass Castle

by Jeannette Walls

The author recalls her life growing up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father and distant mother and describes how she and her siblings had to fend for themselves until they finally found the resources and will to leave home.

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)

Homegoing cover

Homegoing

by Yaa Gyasi

This story follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

Amazon - ABQ Library - AbeBooks (Used)