12APLit English Literature

Your First 12AP Literature Assignment

• Task 1: Get a copy of Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Check the Ballard High School and Seattle Public Libraries – also, there are many used copies of Foster’s book available for few dollars online–Amazon.com or Abebooks.com—or at our local bookstores. This book provides some universal themes and useful ideas to help you read a text closely and come to a deeper understanding.
  • You DO NOT need to read the Foster Book over the Summer!
  • Just have it in class by the first day.
  • We will use this book the first weeks of school.
• Task 2: Look at the following 12APLit Summer Reading List and either from this list below or some other list (you can do a quick search for AP LIT novels) choose at least one of these “AP-worthy” texts. If you’re not sure about a book, check out reviews and/or summaries at the Seattle Public Library, or at Goodreads or at Powells City of Books.
  • Make time to read, and enjoy, at least one book this summer. 
  • Doing so will keep you in practice and prepare you for discussing literature when we meet in September.

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Ballard High School
AP Literature Summer Reading List 2024

Adiche, Americanah
Allende, The House of Spirits
Alvarez, In the Time of Butterflies
Atwood, Oryx and Crake or The Blind Assassin or Cat’s Eye
Austen, Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility
Banks, Cloudsplitter
Bronte, Jane Eyre
Camus, The Stranger
Chopin, The Awakening
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
DeLillo, White Noise
Dick, The Man in the High Castle or Ubik
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment or…
Doyle, A Star Called Henry
Ellison, Invisible Man
Esquival, Like Water for Chocolate
Eugenides, Middlesex
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Forster, Howard’s End
Frazier, Cold Mountain
Gardner, Grendel
Heaney (trans), Beowulf
Jen, Typical American
Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
Kogowa, Obasan
Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladie or The Namesake
Lee, On Such a Full Sea
Lee, Native Speaker or A Gesture Life
Leguin, The Dispossessed or The Left-Hand of Darkness
Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera or 100 Years of Solitude
McCarthy, The Road or No Country for Old Men
McEwan, Atonement or Saturday
McKay, Home to Harlem
Moore, Self Help
Morrison, Song of Solomon or Beloved or Sula
Munro, Runaway
O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Orwell, 1984
Patterson, Out Stealing Horses
Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Robinson, Housekeeping
Roy, God of Small Things
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Sacco, Palestine
St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
Shakespeare, As You Like It, Macbeth, or King Lear
Shelley, Frankenstein
Smith, White Teeth or On Beauty
Warren, All the King’s Men
Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk
Wilson, Fences
Woolf, To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway