11APLA Language & Composition

11AP Summer Reading 2023:
Book Recommendations

Your First 11AP Language Assignment

Welcome to 11th grade Advanced Placement Language and Composition (APLA). To prepare you for a rigorous junior year in which you will grow as a reader, writer, and thinker, we have collected a series of challenging and, we believe, interesting books to choose from for the summer. We expect that reading over the summer will help you prepare for a stimulating college-level course. 

• To Do: Choose at least one of the AP-worthy books from each of the 11APLA Summer Reading Lists below (Non-Fiction & Fiction) that interests you.  If you’re not sure about a book, ask around or check out reviews at the Seattle Public Library, or at Goodreads or on the Powells City of Books site. Select and then make time to read, and hopefully enjoy, at least two books this summer. Doing so will keep you in practice and prepare you for discussing and analyzing texts when we meet in September.

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11APLA Summer Reading List

NON-FICTION

Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Walls Kimmerer
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown
Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner
Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen – Jose Antonio Vargas
Heart Berries – Terese Marie Mailhot
How to be an Antiracist – Ibram X. Kendi
Killers of the Flower Moon – Dan Grann
Lies My Teacher Told Me – Lames Loewen
Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
The Glass Castle – Jeannette Walls
The Power of Trees – Peter Wohlleben
The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson
Think Again – Adam Grant

FICTION

Age of Grief – Jane Smiley
All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
The Beet Queen – Louise Erdrich
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Breathing Lessons – Anne Tyler
Ceremony – Leslie Silko
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Love Medicine – Louise Erdrich
Native Son – Richard Wright
Native Speaker – Change-rae Lee
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Risk Pool – Richard Russo
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises – Ernst Hemingway
A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
White Noise – Don Delillo