English IV & AP
2010 Recommended summer reading
Prior to the first week of the new school year, please read at least one of the following titles, all written by authors from the British Isles or Commonwealth. If you are enrolled in English IV AP, please select at least two titles, one from list I and one from list II. You are, of course, encouraged to choose additional titles for your own pleasure reading. (N.B. “H” designates historical fiction, set in a period earlier than its date of composition; “F” represents a work set in the future.)
I. Nineteenth century
Jane Austen, Persuasion (1818)
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) (H)
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
II. Twentieth/Twenty-first century
Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) (F)
Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991) (H)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962) (F)
A.S. Byatt, Possession (1990)
Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) (H)
Roddy Doyle, The Van (1991)
Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (1981)
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time (2003)
George Hagen, Tom Bedlam (2007) (H)
Nick Hornby, High Fidelity (1995)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) (F)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989) (H)
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009) (H)
Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001) (H)
Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (1995) (H)
Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander (1969) (H)
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (1992) (H)
George Orwell, 1984 (1949) (F)
Graham Swift, Waterland (1983)
Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (1992) (H) or Morality Play (1995) (H)
Several of these novels have been adapted into fine movies. Feel free to rent the film after you read the novel, as you could elect to write a brief comparison of the two for your first written assignment.
