Pre-AP/GT Summer Reading

	As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner Faulkner uses many characters and their inner psychological voices to tell the story of the Bundren family. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch (mother) of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members tell their thoughts, while they face problem after problem in getting to the town.
Add your content here	Brave New World – Aldous Huxley "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow.
	The Color Purple – Alice Walker Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being sexually abused by her father and attempts to protect her sister from the same fate. It then moves to her marriage with "Mister," a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister's letters from her. The rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
	The Awakening--Kate Chopin This is the story of a married woman's emotional journey. Young Edna Pontellier feels trapped in her life with husband, Leonce—even though they have money. Then during one summer on vacation in Grand Isle, an island off the coast of Louisiana, she meets a man who makes her want to be free. Edna begins to change...will she lose her marriage because of her feelings?
	Cry the Beloved Country – Alan Paton In search of missing family members, Zulu priest Stephen Kumalo leaves his South African village to traverse the deep and perplexing city of Johannesburg in the 1940s. With his sister turned prostitute, his brother turned labor protestor and his son, Absalom, arrested for the murder of a white man, Kumalo must grapple with how to bring his family back from the brink of destruction as the racial tension throughout Johannesburg hampers his attempts to protect his family. With a deep yet gentle voice rounded out by his English accent, Michael York captures the tone and energy of this novel. His rhythmic narration proves hypnotizing. From the fierce love of Kumalo to the persuasive rhetoric of Kumalo's brother and the solemn regret of Absalom, York injects soul into characters tempered by their socioeconomic status as black South Africans.
	Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton The main characters in the novel are Ethan Frome, his wife Zenobia, called Zeena, and her young cousin Mattie Silver. Frome and Zeena marry after she nurses his mother in her last illness. Although Frome seems ambitious and intelligent, Zeena holds him back. When her young cousin Mattie comes to stay on their New England farm, Frome falls in love with her. But the social conventions of the day doom their love and their hopes. The story forcefully conveys Wharton's abhorrence of society's unbending standards of loyalty.
	A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemmingway This is the novel that made Hemingway a literary star. Set in Italy during wartime, it tells the difficult and bittersweet story of love between a soldier and a nurse. It remains a great book of war and love.
	For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemmingway For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological understanding
	Emma – Jane Austen Emma Woodhouse is a young woman in Regency England. She lives with her father, a hypochondriac (person who thinks they are sick all the time) who is also excessively concerned for the health and safety of his loved ones. Emma's friend and only critic is the gentlemanly Mr. Knightley, her ""neighbour"" and brother of her sister's husband. A romance ensues.
	The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck The novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath is also the story of one Oklahoma family, the Joads, who are driven off their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a very human drama.
	Gullivers Travels – Jonathan Swift The novel is the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world. In the beginning Gulliver is shipwrecked on Lilliput, where people are six inches tall. His second voyage takes him to Brobdingnag, where lives a race of giants of great practicality who do not understand figurative language. Gulliver's third voyage takes him to the flying island of Laputa and the nearby continent and capital of Lagado. There he finds very intellectual people obsessed with their own knowledge who talk of nothing else. At Glubdubdrib, the Island of Sorcerers, he speaks with great men of the past and learns from them the lies of history. He also meets the Struldbrugs, who are immortal and, as a result, utterly miserable. In the extremely bitter fourth part, Gulliver visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent, virtuous horses served by brutal, filthy, and degenerate creatures called Yahoos.
	Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Marlow decides he wants nothing more than to be the skipper of a steamship that travels up and down a river in Africa. His aunt has a connection in the Administration Department of a seafaring and exploration company that gathers ivory, and she manages to get Marlow an appointment. He replaces a captain who was killed in a skirmish with the natives. He embarks on a difficult journey filled with tragic sights.
	The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros Esperanza Cordero, a girl coming of age in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, uses poems and stories to express thoughts and emotions about her oppressive environment.
	Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." As the book gets started, the narrator is kicked out of his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south. What follows is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be a really hard thing to nail down.
	Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte Rochester, the masculine beast whom Jane eventually falls for, is a man who sets his own laws and manipulates the lives of those around him; and so, before he can enter into a marriage of equals with Jane he must undergo a change in his character. Should the lesson sound dry, it's not. Jane Eyre is full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a secret that lives in the attic. This is very sexy stuff – especially in the 1800s, another reason Victorian critics weren't quite sure what to make of it.
	The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. They call themselves the Joy Luck Club. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Through their eyes the reader sees what it was like for these women to grow up in China, and how different it is for their daughters growing up in America. Think Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants meets the Divine Secrets of the Ya-ya Sisterhood with an Asian twist.
	The Jungle--Upton Sinclair Upton Beall Sinclair's wrote this novel after he was given $500 to write a fiction series comparing northern paid jobs in factories to the South's slave system before The Civil War. The Jungle interprets the hardships of immigrant and ethnic workers in an industrial meat-packing plant in Chicago during the turn of the century in the United States. The findings, which confirmed Sinclair's account, prompted Congress to pass both the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906.
	Little Women – Louisa May Alcott Little Women is a novel published in 1868 and written by American author Louisa May Alcott. The story concerns the lives and loves of four sisters growing up during the American Civil War. It was based on Alcott's own experiences as a child in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, with her three sisters, Amy (May), Meg (Anna), and Beth (Elizabeth).
	The Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers Twelve-year-old Frankie Adams, longing at once for escape and belonging, takes her role as "member of the wedding" to mean that when her older brother marries she will join the happy couple in their new life together. But Frankie is unlucky in love; Worst of all, "member of the wedding" doesn't mean what she thinks. A gorgeous, brief coming-of-age novel.
	A Passage to India – E. M. Forester When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the real India, they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal.
	The Picture of Doria Gray – Oscar Wilde After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject, Dorian Gray, wishes that the he will always look like the picture does at that moment, and only the picture will chagne. Little does he know that his wish will come true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent, but at what cost?
	A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry A Raisin in the Sun is a the play by Lorraine Hansberry. It is the Youngers, a struggling African-American family whose members deal with poverty, racism, and painful conflict among themselves as they reach for a better life.
	The Return of the Native--Thomas Hardy It tells the story of an idealistic and intellectual young man, Clym Yeobright, who abandons the ambitious goals set for him by his strong-minded mother, after becoming infatuated with a free-spirited, sensuous woman, Eustacia Vye, in a wild and lonely place.
	Moby Dick – Herman Melville This thrilling adventure and epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. More than just the tale of a hair-raising voyage, Melville's riveting story passionately probes man's soul.
	A Separate Peace – John Knowles Sharing a room at Devon, an exclusive New England prep school, in the summer prior to World War II, Gene and Phineas form a complex bond of friendship that draws out both the best and worst characteristics of each boy and leads ultimately to violence, a confession, and the betrayal of trust.
	The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner The novel is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss., in the early 20th century. It describes the decay and fall of the aristocratic Compson family, and of an entire social order, from four different points of view. The first three sections are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjy, an "idiot"; Quentin, a suicidal Harvard freshman; and Jason, the eldest. Each section is focused primarily on a sister who has married and left home. The fourth section comments on the other three as the Compsons' black servants, whose chief virtue is their endurance, reveal the family's moral decline.
	Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte In this novel a pair of narrators, Mr. Lockwood and Nelly Dean, relate the story of Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, and the close-knit bond he forms with his benefactor’s daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. They get along very well, and seem spiritually connected, but they are social unequals, and the saga of frustrated yearning and destruction that follows Catherine’s refusal to marry Heathcliff is unique in the English canon.