<p>Any "must read" books that I should read that won't be covered during the actual year?</p>
<p>For my class we have to read Far From the Madding Crowd as our required summer reading but my teacher didn’t give us anything else. Did yours give you anything?</p>
<p>So many suggestions come to mind. :)</p>
<p>The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner</p>
<p>If you need more just ask!</p>
<p>What you read during the year depends on your teacher, so I have no idea, but I’ll give you my list from last year.</p>
<p>Summer Reading that we had to do:
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (this is not one you should use on the AP novel essay, but it was required for us to read as an “intellectual backdrop” to the course, the quote is my teacher’s words!)
Also, we had to read 2 of the following 5, and post messages on a class wiki about it and respond to other people’s messages/critical questions:<br>
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
William Shakespeare’s King Lear
This is what we read during the year:
Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Kate Chopin: The Awakening
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.<br>
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.<br>
Plus, we had to choose and perform a play as a group. My group did Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw.</p>
<p>These are all novels/plays you could read, and also use on the AP exam (except for the one I said not to use on the exam). I think I got all of them that we read, except for the pieces from our textbook. The ones above that I think are really good for the AP test are: Heart of Darkness, Hamlet, Awakening (definitely read this), Curious Incident of the Dog…</p>
<p>What novels are you required to read during the summer (if any)?</p>
<p>I have to read:
1984
Their Eyes Were Watching God
My Name is Asher Lev
Candide
The Glass Menagerie</p>
<p>Should I read “How to read like a lit professor” first?</p>
<p>^ Definitely. That’s the only required summer reading for us.</p>
<p>Heart of Darkness was a phenomenal read that is applicable to almost every open-ended AP essay. Another book like that is Lolita by Nabokov, and it is MUCH less likely to be written about, making your essay stand out. (Almost all AP Lit classes read HoD, so a lot of kids write about it.)</p>
<p>In our class, we read Things Fall Aaprt; Cry, the Beloved Country; Heart of Darkness; Macbeth; Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; Hamlet; As I Lay Dying; Song of Solomon; and Waiting for Godot. The two Bront</p>
<p>For the essays, do you actually have to read the book or is it sufficient to just know the plot and its themes?</p>
<p>I recommend having a significant knowledge of major Shakespearean works. At least one will nearly always be applicable to the FRQ on the test.</p>
<p>-king Lear
- much ado about nothing
- hamlet
-Macbeth
-Romeo and Juliet </p>
<p>Knowing these is worth your while.</p>
<p>@ Garfieldliker:</p>
<p>You probably could “get by” with a bare bone knowledge of the novel but could never really excel with it. To make your essays actually insightful and deep it would be best to read the book.</p>
<p>I think you will discover as you prep for the AP that knowledge of only a few books (and I mean REALLY in depth knowledge) will get you through it.</p>
<p>Exactly. Many people try to read and analyze a vast amount of books so they are safe, but realistically, only five or six, or even less depending on the books read, are necessary.</p>
<p>I went into the exam knowing 7 books that I could use on the novel essay: Awakening, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet, Beloved, Things Fall Apart, Curious Incident…, & Pygmalion.</p>
<p>The books I had at the ready for the exam were The Awakening, The Sound and The Fury, The Poisonwood Bible (which I used), and The Glass Menagerie. Realistically, I can write about almost any prompt with Poisonwood alone.</p>
<p>To the OP, there are no “must read” books. All that is required is to know enough classics so that you can write about one pertinent to the third essay question.</p>
<p>I would suggest Crime and Punishment. It is quite long, but a thrilling classic - is that an oxymoron? - and not as well known as some others. At the same time it will be relevant to many prompts.</p>
<p>Our summer assignment was Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and a choice between Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (highly recommended by our teacher) and Poisonwood Bible.</p>
<p>Really important ones that come to mind are
*Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
*Hamlet by William Shakespeare (SUPER IMPORTANT!!)
*Catch 22 by an author I don’t feel like looking up now, sorry
*Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger (another good one)
*Things Fall Apart by Chenua Acheba (sp?)</p>
<p>Happy readin’! I liked all of those books a lot, except Frankenstein…wans’t really my cup of tea, but I ended up not using it at all on Question #3 so it’s fine by me.</p>
<p>Two of my summer reading books ( Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov) are supposedly on the exam each year…</p>