<p>I will be taking AP English/Lit next year so I wish to get a head start on the literature I would possibly have to read. I realize that different schools have different reading lists, but I am a voracious reader that needs something to do. So, AP lit/english students, what have you read in this year in your course?</p>
<p>I wasn’t in a traditional AP Lit class. It was a double-enrollment class technically called “Western Civilization and Thought,” so we actually read a lot more than most Lit students. These are the only novels I can remember:</p>
<p>Hard Times by Charles Dickens
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert</p>
<p>I can give you a longer list of short stories if you want that?</p>
<p>My summer reading for AP Lit:</p>
<p>Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge</p>
<p>Not sure what we’re going to be reading during the year.</p>
<p>Last year, for AP Lang (taught as American lit if you couldn’t tell):
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway</p>
<p>OK, you NEED TO READ Oedipus the king (just that play; there are a couple of others related to oedipus, don’t worry about them). I swear, my teacher made us look through like 40 years of past ap lit open essay questions and almost every single prompt can in some way relate oedipus. No joke, that play is a life saver on that open essay question.</p>
<p>^ Oedipus Rex is definitely a must.</p>
<p>I took the AP Lit exam this year, and from my experience, the most applicable works to read (including Oedipus Rex) are:</p>
<p>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce
The Once and Future King by T.H. White
The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald
Invisible Man by Ellison
1984 by Orwell (this is like the most applicable novel to anything :p)
Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky</p>
<p>plus they’re all really great books anyways</p>