<p>I've just received my summer assignment and I'm kinda lost right now. So we're supposed to read 2 novels and create dialectal journals for each. I know how to do this, but I don't know what novel to read. We're required to read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy so the first choice is accounted for. As for the other one we were given a list of acceptable novels and told to choose one, the only problem is I don't know what to choose. </p>
<p>The list includes: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<br>
Animal Farm<br>
Brave New World<br>
A Clockwork Orange<br>
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter<br>
The Kite Runner<br>
Lord of the Flies<br>
The Other<br>
The Shipping News<br>
The Sun Also Rises<br>
Wise Blood
All The Kings Men
As I Lay Dying
Black Boy
Deliverance
Henderson the Rain King<br>
Life of Pi
1984
A Separate Peace<br>
Slaughterhouse Five
The Things They Carried by</p>
<p>So let me know if you've read and can recommend any of these books. Also do you have any general tips to help me with the course. (This is my first AP class, I'm also taking AP Gov)</p>
<p>I’ve read all of those except Wise Blood and Henderson the Rain King. I recommend most of them, especially, The Things They Carried (look up and learn about “metafiction” after you read it!), Brave New World (far more prescient than 1984, its dystopian cousin), All the King’s Men (veild Huey Long bio by the only writer to win Pulitzers for both poetry AND prose!) and Slaughterhouse Five (hilarious, dark, mind-bending). Of course, your taste may vary, but unless you really want a challenge, I’d skip As I Lay Dying.</p>
<p>Brave New World was very good and not a difficult read; 1984 is similar in that it’s also dystopian, but it controls its people in a different way that gets disturbing (aka pain and torture!). So personally I liked Brave New World better. The Kite Runner is good and very easy because it is so recent. Slaughterhouse Five is good but don’t read it if you don’t like science fiction. It is very interesting because of its disjointed narrative, but that can get a bit confusing.
Lord of the Flies was disturbing. I didn’t like it. (Not to say that disturbing is always bad, I just read Fight Club and it’s excellent. Not for AP lit though.)</p>
<p>Deliverance is extremely creepy. A Separate Peace was eh. I hate A Clockwork Orange. Brave New World is one of my favorite books. I like Richard Wright, but I’ve never read Black Boy (I picked up Native Son instead). Slaughter-house Five is great.</p>
<p>First off, consider yourself lucky. as that is a light summer assignment. </p>
<p>And if you’re taking AP US Gov, i would def read the things they carried. It’s a really good book in helping understand the themes of storytelling and the Vietnam war.</p>
<p>Animal Farm is short and a classic (read this book even if you don’t do it for the journal) </p>
<p>Life of Pi is a really good book too in my opinion. if you get to the conclusion on your own its really heart-wrenching. I had to read it for sophomore english i wouldn’t read it for this purpose (AP Lit) but if you find yourself interested in it…</p>
<p>I really admire some of your teacher’s selections of more modern/newer novels as choices to read. My AP Lit teacher at my school just gave out the assignment (5 books none of them modern) </p>
<p>Try to pick the book that is not as modern as the Road, and is a much more challenging piece of literature. (eww awkward my bad)</p>
<p>From that list, I would highly recommend A Clockwork Orange. Although it definitely isn’t an easy read due to the dialect (which Anthony Burgess fundamentally created himself), it’s a great novel with humor and wit as well as interesting social commentary. As Alex would say, it’s “real horrorshow”.</p>
<p>Most of these books are actually pretty good!</p>
<p>The Things They Carried was most likely my favorite book I read in AP Lit last year. It’s a contemporary novel that’s language is easy to understand, which makes it a fairly quick read. Very interesting and intriguing, even though it is about war (coming from a girl who typically likes romantic novels).</p>
<p>I also highly recommend The Kite Runner…one of my favorite books from recent years. I read this for my outside winter reading assignment and it has now become one of my favorite novels. It really draws the reader in and was a struggle for me to put down. Highly captivating and moving. Also, this book is fantastic for AP exams as there are a lot of things could write about concerning it.</p>
<p>I Would Recommend Reading 1984 by George Orwell. It is a great easy read, and it really is mind boggling how a government can control it’s people like it did. Plus the ending is rather twisty! :)</p>
<p>If you become short on time, Lord of the Flies is a very easy read and can be interesting. I’m not familiar with the dialectal journal so I can’t say if it will work well for that assignment.</p>
<p>I’d recommend 1984, personally. That or Brave New World. Both are fairly quick and easy reads, and are full of straightforward, clear literary devices that can be used in papers, on the SAT, and later on the AP Exam. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t recommend Huck Finn or The Things They Carried, though. Huck Finn is way too challenging to read on your own, and I’d bet that you’d really regret your choice of reading it by the end–in my class it was unanimously our absolute least favorite book of the year, and I ended up Sparknoting the last few chapters because I just couldn’t slog through it anymore. I didn’t read The Things They Carried until AP Lang (which comes after Lit at my school for some reason), but I really didn’t enjoy it. It’s nothing like the other books on that list, as it’s closer to non-fiction than fiction. If you’re into war stories and non-fiction, it’d be a good pick, I guess, but it’s not as straightforward as the two I recommended, and it may not be the best start to your AP career.</p>
<p>Just to let you know, I only really read 3 books in my Lit class last year (Huck Finn, Great Gatsby, Scarlet Letter), and was able to prep two of those (along with 1984 from 10th grade) for the exam, and pulled out a 5. Stick to books that are easy reads with lots of clear, wide ranging symbols and devices.</p>
<p>Brave New World is probably my favorite book, so obviously I’d recommend reading that one! I love how it’s written and the perspective it takes on the whole dystopian society, as opposed to Orwell’s Oceana in 1984. If you have the time, they’re good books to read together, even if you’d only write a journal on one of them. Lord of the Flies is also a good story, and an easy read, if that’s what you’re looking for. And I personally enjoyed A Separate Peace, but I read that for fun a couple of years ago.</p>
<p>I also managed to fit Brave New World to essentially every practice AP essay we had to write during the year, including the one on the actual AP exam. I didn’t even have to be too creative with the interpretation!</p>
<p>Here are some of my opinions on the books I read. They’re really biased, but depending on the amount of time you want to spend reading these books here’s how fast I felt like I was going on them.<br>
Quick reads (I read modern writing much faster than older pieces, who doesn’t? so some of the books may be long in length but easy to read):
Life of Pi- awesome book, written in a very different style from all of these books. Very fun to read, but still very serious.
Animal Farm- literally short (100-200 pg) and simple writing. It’s a great read though.<br>
Brave New World- creeped me out, I didn’t like it. I can’t deny that it wasn’t very well written though.<br>
The Kite Runner- very sad story. It’s pretty hard to put down, but has some really serious moments.<br>
Lord of the Flies- simple to read, pretty violent though but easy to understand and finish.<br>
The Things They Carried- fun read, still very serious. It’s written in a stream of consciousness voice so I felt like I was reading really quickly to keep up with his thoughts </p>
<p>Long Reads:
Black Boy- hated this book. It was very well written, but the attitude of the writer really bothered me -.- Autobiographical, very serious, some mature scenes.
1984- similar to Brave New World with the dystopia setting, more dark and more difficult to understand imo (this might be because I read it far earlier than I read BNW though).
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- weird, this was our Eng Lang book. Amusing and there is a deep theme to the entire story, but it’s written in a bit of a childish manner to me. Easy to read when you get used to the diction, but physically longer like 400 pages.</p>
<p>Hope this helps a bit. My favorite of those I’ve read are probably Animal Farm (b/c of the interesting political ideas) and Life of Pi. Animal Farm should take you an hour or two at most and Life of Pi a week if you read an hour a day at most.</p>
<p>I’m so jealous of your summer HW… we got to choose between two awful books written in the 18th and 19th century, had to read Shakespeare and Siddartha. Only 20 poems left to annotate now TT-TT and two essays to write…</p>
<p>I found Heart is a Lonely Hunter to be a long boring read…but it was the weeks leading up to winter break so that might have been part of it.
Animal Farm is interesting and short, I read it freshman year.
Lord of the Flies is also short , it worked extremely well with this years test prompt.
Life of Pi is a very fast read with an ending that makes you want to read the book again slowly.</p>
<p>You have a lot of opinions already so I’ll just second don’t read As I Lay Dying unless you’re looking for a challenge. Or really, really love (and comprehend) Faulkner’s style.</p>
<p>Huck Finn was annoying in the sense of language, sometimes its hard to get through some parts where the character Jim speaks lol-like literally had to go online and find out what he was saying. The things they carried wasn’t bad, it’s a recounting of a man’s Vietnam war experience. Life of pi was too prolonged imo. I also had to read walden, which I loved its scholarly message. Scarlet letter uses nature to emphasize the situation at any point in the novel. I loved great gatsby.</p>
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