<p>My main dorky habit is to read the Barnes and Noble Classics Series books. I'm constantly reading them and putting off school work, studying, etc. Although I eventually focus on the schoolwork so it's not a problem, I wish I could justify my reading with the fact that it'd help me on the two English AP tests. </p>
<p>So here's my question: will it? And if so, how much, and for which test (or both)?</p>
<p>As an addition, if people out there think it's really beneficial, then which books in particular would you suggest reading? I love ones such as Sense and Sensibility, The Idiot, Anna Karenina, etc.</p>
<p>YES, do it. The more the better. It will improve your writing for Lang and give you essay ammunition in Lit.
These are the books I read in my AP English classes.
LANG:
The Great Democracies, Churchill
Billions & Billions, Sagan
Freakonomics, Dubner/Levitt
The Tipping Point, Gladwell
A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving
1984, Orwell
Gathering Blue, Lowry
Anthem, Rand
Brave New World, Huxley
The Tempest, Shakespeare
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll
Pygmalion, Shaw</p>
<p>LIT:
The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Medea, Euripides
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
Grendel, Gardner
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Fences, Wilson
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard
Waiting for Godot, Beckett
A Streetcar Named Desire, Williams
Death of a Salesman, Miller
Candide, Voltaire
A Doll’s House, Ibsen
Frankenstein, Shelley
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky (READ THIS BOOK AND USE IT ON THE LIT TEST. Everything they could ever possibly ask for on Question 3 is somewhere in this book. EVERYTHING. Don’t use Hamlet or Crime and Punishment, use this.)</p>
<p>I’ve really wanted to read The Brothers Karamazov ever since I began The Idiot. I’m glad to know that it’s going to prove to be so useful! I’ve read a good amount of these already and I know the curriculum for my Lang class next year and with both of those together I’ll have most covered! </p>
<p>Another question, though, if you don’t mind. Why did those books end up in the Lang or Lit categories? What differentiates between them? Should I focus more on a certain style of books for each test/year?</p>
<p>I don’t know about AP, but for the Regents, I wrote about The Count of Monte Cristo, which I had just happened to read for fun that year. Plus, everyone thought I was a dork lugging around that huge book, but it was soo worth it. </p>
<p>Either way, you should always be reading, it really expands your vocabulary and helps with your writing. Even if you can’t mention the books in your essays, they will help you in the long run. Plus, why not? :)</p>
<p>
^Wow. My teacher was absent for about half the year, and we ended up reading a total of about 3 or 4 books for AP Comp. It was bad.</p>
<p>^1984, BNW, Tempest, JC, Alice, and Pygmalian were the only ones we read as a class. The rest were from reading lists.</p>
<p>
It’s such a good story. It’s super long and detailed and mind-numbingly slow until about book seven, but it is so, so good. And it really does apply to everything. At the end of the year (right before the test), we did an activity where we had to write theses for five past question 3 prompts using TBK in ten minutes and it was amazingly easy. Plus, EVERYONE uses Hamlet and Crime & Punishment and Grendel on question 3, so it gives the reader a nice break if you use something less common.</p>
<p>
Well, the main difference in the tests is that Lang has more to do with composition and Lit has more to do with analysis. The biggest difference in the reading material is that you can use nonfiction in Lang (like Freakonomics, Billions and Billions, The Tipping Point, and The Great Democracies). Other than that, it doesn’t matter a ton what you read for which class. The only question on either test that actually requires you to have read anything outside of the test is question 3 on Lit. Lang’s questions are a rhetorical analysis, a synthesis question, and a persuasive essay, and Lit’s first two questions are analyses of given passages of poetry and prose. I didn’t mention any book on my Lang test and I still got a 5 (and my third essay was in first person). The reading for Lang is more to expand your horizons. The more kinds of writing you’re exposed to, the more natural your command of English will become. While it’s good to read books you think you’ll be able to use on question three of Lit, it’s just as important to read and practice analyzing all kinds of literature so you’ll be prepared for anything on the first two questions and on the crit read. They also don’t have to be 800 pages long like Brothers Karamazov. I highly recommend Candide. It’s really short, but it’s also one of the strongest examples of satire you could ever find (and it’s hilarious), and that is something you can definitely use.
Like topasalacqua13 said, the most important thing is that you don’t stop reading.</p>
<p>Man steel, your class was on crack. We did like 7 books for Lit. </p>
<p>My contribution to this thread: Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Brothers Karamazov had the right idea but Huck Finn does the same job with way less work. My Lit teacher gave me a packet with every Thematic Analysis (#3) question since the test’s inception, and I literally found maybe 5 out of the 50 or 60 prompts that didn’t work. Huck Finn is medium length, but it tackles a ton of societal issues, and it really uses a pretty broad range of literary devices, so putting together an Thematic Analysis would be simplified big time if you had this under your belt.</p>
<p>Also Huck Finn isn’t <em>too</em> deep. Its a popular required novel for most high schools because, as I said, its pretty rich, and its not particularly hard to understand. To give you some perspective, in my Lit class I never made below an 8 on the timed essays we did, but the only ones I got 9’s on were the Huck Finn ones, and the Slaughterhouse Five ones (but that’s because I’d read the book like 4 times).</p>
<p>Oh my… How does one read so many books with other commitments (courses, college apps, etc.)?</p>
<p>My summer reading list so far has been:
Crime and Punishment
Gulliver’s Travels
Time Machine
Fahrenheit 451
How to Escape From a Leper Colony
Les Mis</p>
<p>steel- I’m even more excited now to read the story! I had no idea that it was that long, but I tend to gravitate towards ridiculously long and rather slow stories so I’m pretty pumped. </p>
<p>Wow, thanks for the heads up on the differences between the two tests, and what is required for each. I honestly wasn’t aware of any of that. I start AP Lang next year and Lit the year after though, so I guess my teachers would eventually inform me, haha. Candide sounds right down my alley. Hopefully I’ll be able to fit it in this summer with all of the other stuff I’m reading. :)</p>
<p>michaelhiggins- First of all, I need to figure out how to quote people on here. I think it’d make me a little bit easier to follow. Anyway, your points on Huck Finn I can agree with! I read it this year in my honors english class so it’s still fresh in my mind. Do you think that the graders would be turned off by its relative easiness or that it’s hackneyed, though?</p>
<p>IMO, Lang won’t be affected much by reading too many books. Sure, reading books will certainly improve your composition and command on vocab, grammar, etc., but it won’t do much on the AP exam. That, you can simply practice for by reading and comprehending passages and such. As for the essays, 1 is synthesis, like a DBQ from history, 1 is providing your side of a debate, and 1 is passage-reading (synthesis, persuasive, rhetorical). Concentrate on the Aristotelian Mode of Rhetorical Analysis (ethos, pathos, logos) and such.</p>
<p>As for the books I read in AP Lang, they were as follows:</p>
<p>Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
Death of a Salesman
The Great Gatsby
Short Passages (Elizabeth Stanton, Chief Seattle, etc.)
Speeches (JFK, Obama, MLK)</p>
<p>Apart from this list, we read 5 other books for essay assignments and wrote some essays including comparison, causal, narrative, and descriptive. So it leans more to how you write rather than what the writing is about. That’s where AP Lit comes in.</p>
<p>^I’m so sorry you had to read The Scarlet Letter in a class as awesome as AP Lang. That’s just such a shame.</p>
<p>bethechange - [ quote ] TEXTTEXTTEXT [ /quote ] but without spaces. :)</p>
<p>michaelwiggins - Huck Finn is a great book, too. I can definitely see how you could use it for a lot. I just like how TBK has such a vast array of options (and I like the story better).</p>
<p>MrWheezy - Ha, I know right? I had pretty light schedules. I had pretty light schedules. Junior year my only homework classes were Precalc and APUSH and senior year all I had was AP US Gov/Macroecon, and we barely ever had homework in there. I only applied to two colleges and I finished my apps in early November before things got crazy. But there were definitely people with horrible schedules. They spread it out nicely, though, and in Lang, we read all the plays in class. Lit was a little ridiculous for a while. At one point, we were doing a 20-page journal about the second half of Grendel, preparing fifteen-minute presentations on various Canterbury Tales, reading women’s lit (The Handmaid’s Tale), and starting on essays about Grendel and the meaning of heroism. So it was fun, haha.</p>
<p>Well, I’d like to say reading a lot is going to help you on the English exams, but, quite frankly, I don’t feel like it really does – at least not directly.</p>
<p>I mean, once you read a critical number of books (assuming they’re diverse), you can essentially write any essay they throw at you for question 3 on the Lit exam. Anything more than that may cloud your memory. And what’s more, question 3 is the only essay that requires you to write about a book – you could theoretically do the rest of the test without reading any books.</p>
<p>And the Language exam doesn’t require a whole lot of reading, to be honest. It’s mostly rhetorical analysis and crafting strong arguments, which don’t REQUIRE books as supporting evidence (though you can use them). I read maybe 2 books in my Eng Lang class and still got a 5 on the exam. </p>
<p>Of course, I’m only talking about directly improving your score. Reading is beneficial for so many other things, as other posters have stated – writing, syntax, recognizing motifs, literary analysis, etc. What’s more, this could indirectly improve your score by helping you draw stronger conclusions, write more persuasively, and provide more insightful comments.</p>
<p>The Crying of Lot 49
Swann’s Way
Within a Budding Grove
Never Let Me Go
Phedre
The Sun Also Rises
A Farewell to Arms
Vanity Fair
The Bell Jar
Famous Last Words</p>
<p>In-class:</p>
<p>Wuthering Heights
The Great Gatsby
The Kite Runner
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
1984
Hamlet
Othello</p>
<p>Unless you are in DIRE need of a third dystopian book along with 1984 and Brave New World, skip Fahrenheit 451. It’s very clunky and on-the-nose, at times, and has that one quality postmodernism is based on: self-awareness. However, the self-awareness is not quirky or clever or well-done, it just makes the writing seem stilted.
It’s not Bradbury’s fault; the story was originally a short story and someone asked him to expand it into a novella. Unfortunately, it shows.
This is a matter of personal opinion, but rationally 451 explores no broad themes that you won’t find written ten times better in 1984 or BNW.</p>
<p>What helped me the most was just practicing essays, at least for AP Language. Analysis is truly the key for AP Language, which is more non-fiction oriented. But I hear that AP Literature it is more fiction based, so what you’re doing sounds good to me at least.</p>
YES. Omg agree I did not like that book. There are plenty of way better dystopias out there - Anthem, Children of Men, and We (and Animal Farm, of course) come to mind. Anthem and Animal Farm as short, PACKED with useful stuff, and really fun reads, unlike 451.</p>
<p>Animal Farm was such a joy to read. And yeah, The Scarlett Letter was awfully boring. For me. =/ But so was The Great Gatsby for that matter. Which confuses me, because a LOT of people in my class were talking about how great/awesome of a book it was. I never really understood why it was so great. </p>
<p>Could anyone tell me why THEY liked TGG? Sorry for going off-topic to the original poster’s intentions.</p>
<p>Also, what is 1984 about? I’m interested, but would like to know a little bit more.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about Huck Finn being hackneyed. My Lit teacher was an AP reader and she didn’t seem to think it was a problem. As long as your writing style isn’t clich</p>
<p>It’s about a totalitarian government that has total control over its citizens, including their thoughts. There are many parallels to the real world during the authors time era, like the Ministry of Truth was based on a BBC office, where they would alter the truth and make the citizens love the British government for it’s “success” in the war, when they was in fact losing. </p>
<p>I read it in grade 9. It’s good essay ammunition.</p>
If you liked Animal Farm, you will like 1984. It’s quite dark and a lot of people find it horribly depressing, but I love it. Essentially, the world has been divided into I think three huge nations that are constantly at war. The book takes place in what was once London, where everyone is under constant surveillance by “Big Brother” and is brainwashed into everlasting allegiance to the Party (the governing body). The plot follows Winston Smith, a Party member, as he starts having doubts about the intentions of the Party and even the existence of Big Brother. He starts seeing how the Party basically keeps its people in line by inciting hatred of enemy nations through lies and propoganda. And when he realizes the impossibility of his wish for solitude, he faces the consequences. It’s really an amazing book (and just as readable as Animal Farm). I read the whole thing in about three sittings. It’s impossible to put down and the ending is just ridiculous. I remember finishing and thinking ■■■■ THAT WAS INCREDIBLE.
If you’ve read Brave New World, you’ll remember how the leadership in that world controls its denizens by manufacturing happiness and eradicating everything that has ever been unsettling. 1984 is just the opposite. They create control by arousing vicious nationalism and arousing bitter hatred. Definitely worth a read.</p>
<p>As for TGG, I agree that it’s a little over-rated, but I did enjoy how it implies that everything has a terrible dark side and that the worst problems often exist in what look like the best places. Also, Owl Eyes is God (never forget :P). But I did think it was a little more boring than everyone says.</p>