AP independent reading assignment

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April 2015 Reading assignment

AP English

For this assignment, choose a book you have heard of but never had the time to read, a book you have heard everyone should read in high school, a book someone has recommended highly to you. But give this choice one particular thought: it should be a title of “literary merit,” one you could use with no embarrassment for the basis of an exam essay, one that might well be taught in an advanced high school or college literature course. The list below is a composite of different lists I have recommended over the years. Rule out anything you’ve already read, please. I’ve already ruled out novels over 500 pages, since I very much want you to complete this assignment on time. Suggest another title of “comparable literary merit” if you wish.

The assignment is to write a paper of approximately 4 pages in response to one of the prompts on this website. Yes, there are over 40 to choose from, but that means you should be able to find one that works. But read most of the book before you try to select a topic, please.

Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1984)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (1847)

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte (1847)

The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1899)

Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (1900)

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe (1721)
Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1854)

A Passage to India or Howard's End, E.M. Forster (1924, 1910)

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy (1895)

Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (2003)
Obasan, Joy Kogawa (1981)

Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton (1948)

Native Son, Richard Wright (1940)

Pat Barker, Regeneration (1991)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)

Nadine Gordimer, July’s People (1981)

Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)

Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)

George Orwell, 1984 (1949)

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger (1992)

Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence (1920)

Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie
Persuasion or Emma, Jane Austen
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
My Antonia; O Pioneers!, Willa Cather
As I Lay Dying,  William Faulkner
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
All the Pretty Horses or The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Native Son, Richard Wright