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This is my reading list for this summer in preparation for Honors and AP English classes at Beverly Hills High School.

You may order these books from amazon.com by clicking either the title or the image.  That will take you directly to the specific book site and you may add each one to your "shopping cart."  You will need to refer back to this site to choose each book. These are the versions of the books I ordered, however, other versions of the book are available. A brief synopsis is available for selected books.

10th Grade Honors Reading List

Brave New World Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Barron's Book Notes) Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Bloom's Notes)		(synopsis)
Lord of the Flies		(synopsis)
Cry, the Beloved Country		(synopsis)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles		(synopsis)
Cyrano De Bergerac - Heroic Comedy in Five Acts		(synopsis)
Siddhartha		(synopsis)

11th Grade Honors Reading List

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings		(synopsis)
Invisible Man		(synopsis)
Grapes of Wrath		(synopsis)
Ethan Frome		(synopsis)

12th Grade AP Reading List

Lucky Jim
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Call it Sleep
Lives of a Cell

You may read a synopsis of selected books below:

Brave New World
Novel by Aldous Huxley, published in 1932. The book presents a nightmarish vision of a future society. The novel depicts a scientifically balanced, efficiently controlled state that allows for no personal emotions or individual responses; art and beauty are considered disruptive, and mother and father are forbidden terms (everyone belongs to everyone). Into this world is introduced John the Savage, who was abandoned with his mother in a primitive outpost by a former Director of (human) Hatcheries. John is a thinking, feeling individual who has read William Shakespeare, witnessed primitive religious rituals, and known loneliness. When his mother dies of an overdose of the brave new world's feel-good drug, John swells a violent revolt. He engages in a dialogue with the World Controller, is harassed as a freak of the accepted social order, and, finally despairing, kills himself. (From The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature)

Lord of the Flies
Capturing generations of readers since its publication in 1954, Lord of the Flies is a cult favorite among students and literary critics. An adventure tale in its purest form, this thrilling account of a group of British schoolboys marooned on a tropical island exposes the duality of human nature itself--the dark, eternal divide between order and chaos, intellect and instinct, structure and savagery.

Cry, the Beloved Country
Paton's deeply moving story of Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set against the backdrop of a land and people riven by racial inequality and injustice, remains the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history. Published to coincide with the Miramax film release in December, starring James Earl Jones and Richard Harris.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Novel by Thomas Hardy, first published serially in bowdlerized form in the Graphic (July-December 1891) and in its entirety in book form (three volumes) the same year. It was subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented because Hardy felt that its heroine was a virtuous victim of a rigid Victorian moral code. Now considered Hardy's masterwork, it departed from conventional Victorian fiction in its focus on the rural lower class and in its open treatment of sexuality and religion. After her impoverished family learns of its noble lineage, naive Tess Durbeyfield is sent to make an appeal to a nearby wealthy family who bear the ancestral name d'Urberville. Tess is seduced by dissolute Alec d'Urberville and secretly bears a child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy. Later working as a dairymaid she meets and marries Angel Clare, an idealistic gentleman who rejects Tess after learning of her past on their wedding night. Emotionally bereft and financially impoverished, Tess is trapped by necessity into giving in once again to d'Urberville, but she murders him when Angel returns. After a few days with Angel, Tess is arrested and executed. (From The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature)

Cyrano De Bergerac - Heroic Comedy in Five Acts
This translation of Rostand's classic story is "a crowd pleaser . . . sumptuous, rousing" (Newsweek). "Emotional depth Rostand himself would surely have envied . . . Burgess' extravagant verse keeps its contours, yet trips off the tongue almost as though it were contemporary speech."--London Times.

Siddhartha
In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man, leaves his family for a contemplative life, then, restless, discards it for one of the flesh. He conceives a son, but bored and sickened by lust and greed, moves on again. Near despair, Siddhartha comes to a river where he hears a unique sound. This sound signals the true beginning of his life -- the beginning of suffering, rejection, peace, and, finally, wisdom.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

Invisible Man
Invisible Man is a book about race in America. Few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared or been resolved as of yet. Ellison's first novel goes beyond the a narrow definition of race and into a description of the human race. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

Grapes of Wrath
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life, including a tragic occurrence while visiting her mother in St. Louis and her formative years spent in California--where an unwanted pregnancy changed her life forever. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."

Ethan Frome
Invisible Man is a book about race in America. Few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared or been resolved as of yet. Ellison's first novel goes beyond the a narrow definition of race and into a description of the human race. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

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Last updated on 10/18/02

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