AP Lit. Summer Reading

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and 1984 by George Orwell

2. Book of Choice

Each student should choose a second work of literary merit for her summer reading. Any work that is both challenging and possessed of literary merit will work for summer reading. Some works you might consider are located in these lists:

A List of Classic texts.

Mr. Pogreba’s Suggestions

• Underworld by Don DeDillo
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• Blindness by Jose Saramago
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Mr. Salisbury’s Suggestions

• Harold Bloom:  Shakespeare-The Invention of the Human
• Virginia Woolf:  A Room of One’s Own
• Walt Whitman:  Leaves of Grass
• Anton Chekhov:  Collected Stories
• Jonathan Swift:  Gulliver’s Travels
• Earnest Hemmingway:  The Sun Also Rises
• Emily Bronte:  Wuthering Heights
• Aphra Behn:  Oroonoko
• William Shakespeare:  Twelfth Night
• Ken Kesey:  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Mr. Proctor’s Suggestions

• Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
• Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Sons and Lovers by D.H.Lawrence
• Daisy Miller by Henry James
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
• Going after Cacciato by Tim O’Brien
• Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

3. Titles to Avoid

Because you may read these works in class, avoid these titles for your summer reading:

• Invisible Man
• Heart of Darkness

• King Lear
• The Inferno
• Beowulf
• Resurrection
• Crime and Punishment
•  Love in the Time of Cholera
• Great Expectations
• Death of a Salesman
• The Road
• Hamlet
• Antigone
• Wuthering Heights
• Pride and Prejudice
• The Lake of the Woods
• Catch-22
• 1984
• As I Lay Dying
• Siddhartha
• Things Fall Apart
• Slaughterhouse Five
• The Stranger
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Orlando

4. Read More!

Spending time in the summer reading an additional title or two (along with some excellent poetry) will make you better prepared for AP Literature, college, and life as a fully realized human being.