AP Literature Summer Reading Requirements 2012

Summer Reading/Writing Assignments

AP Literature and Composition

Summer 2012

In order to be prepared for the challenges you’ll face in AP Literature and Composition next year, it is necessary for you to start reading upper-level material this summer. You are required to read TWO novels or plays during the summer.  In addition, you will have a writing assignment to accompany each work you select. These assignments will be turned in when you return in August (on the second or third day of class) and will comprise your first 20 summative points for the semester.

You may choose any two works written by the authors listed below underneath the writing assignments. In addition, I have listed all the large works we will be reading this year.

Writing Assignments

You will complete a directed journal for each of the books/plays you read. These do not have length requirements, but they must contain the following elements:

            1. Process log –

Write a few paragraphs in which you describe as carefully as possible the PROCESS of your reading. You should use these questions to guide your thinking.

A. What did you understand, think, feel as you read?

B. What words/phrases were confusing? If there are many – obviously don’t include all of them.

C. What characters seemed clear to you and why? Which characters were a blur and why?

D. At what points can you identify with what is happening or with what a character is saying/feeling?

2. Quotation Response

A. Choose a quote from anywhere in the book (it does not have to be dialogue) and coy it. Then write a description of the type of reader the language of the passage creates and assumes. This is prompting you to ask, “To whom, exactly, is the narrator speaking?”

I passed out an extensive list (which I do not have on the computer) of works that would meet the above requirements. If you have not read anything yet – panic. Then, choose works written by any of the following authors.

Thomas Hardy                                      Flannery O’Conner              Margaret Atwood                F.Scott Fitzgerald

Ernest Hemingway                               Anne Tyler                            Charlotte Bronte                   Jane Austin

Alice Walker                                         John Irving                            Isak Dinesan                          Bram Stoker

Joseph Heller                                        Jane Smiley                           Tennessee Williams            James Agee

Jonathan Swift                                      Charles Dickens                   Joseph Conrad                     Arthur Miller

William Shakespeare                           Maya Angelou                     Cormac McCarthy                William Faulkner

Laura Esquival                                      Nora N. Hurston                   Toni Morrison                      Upton Sinclair

Books we’ll read during the year:

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The  Scarlett Letter

The  Kite Runner by Kahled Hosseini

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

I am One of You Forever by Fred Chappell