Advanced Placement Language and Composition Summer Reading
To ensure that your brains will not turn into mush over the course of this summer, please complete the following assignments and be ready to discuss the texts, prove you read the texts, and complete the accompanying assignments for the texts during the first week of school.
You can pick up these copies at the bookstore, the local library, or purchase them on your own. Below each text is a review and information about the book that is posted on amazon.com.
Required Books
Be prepared to write essay(s), participate in Socratic Seminar(s), and other activities regarding these three books to be completed during the first few weeks of school.
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel.
*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet
Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer
After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. Four months later, he turned up dead. His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving. They also reflect the posturing of a confused young man, raised in affluent Annandale, Va., who self-consciously adopted a Tolstoyan renunciation of wealth and return to nature. Krakauer, a contributing editor to Outside and Men's Journal, retraces McCandless's ill-fated antagonism toward his father, Walt, an eminent aerospace engineer.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain.
2013 AP Language Summer Reading