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Summer Reading Guide

Harrison High School June 2017

*Please note: The titles listed below are simply options for the selections process. Students are free to choose titles outside of this list. Descriptions, with few exceptions, are taken from library catalog summaries.*

And Then There Were None / Agatha Christie A killer stalks a group of ten total strangers on an isolated island off the Devon coast, in a suspenseful story of murder and retribution set to a sinister nursery rhyme.

A Thousand Splendid Suns / Khaled Hosseini Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in war torn Kabul, losses incurred over the course of thirty years that test the limits of their strength and courage.

The Awakening / Kate Chopin The Awakening shocked turn-of-the-century readers with its forthright treatment of affairs and suicide. Departing from literary convention, Kate Chopin failed to condemn her heroine's desire for an affair with the son of a Louisiana resort owner, whom she meets on vacation.

Bartimaeus Trilogy Book One: The Amulet of Samarkand / by Jonathan S Nathaniel, a magician's apprentice, summons up the djinni Bartimaeus and instructs him to steal the Amulet of Samarkand from the powerful magician Simon Lovelace.

Before I Fall / Lauren Oliver After she dies in a car crash, teenage Samantha relives the day of her death over and over again until, on the seventh day, she finally discovers a way to save herself.

Beowulf / translated by Seamus Heaney This classic Anglo-Saxon poem, filled with battle scenes, is named for a young warrior in fifth-century Scandinavia who achieves glory by fighting and killing various monsters and governing his land wisely for 50 years.

Blessings / Anna Quindlen When a teenage couple abandons their baby at the gate of the estate owned by Lydia Blessing, Skip Cuddy, the estate caretaker, decides to raise the child himself, a decision that has a profound effect on the lives of everyone in the community.

The Book Thief / Markus Zusak Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

Breakfast of Champions / Kurt Vonnegut Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Bucking the Sarge / Christopher Paul Curtis Deeply involved in his cold and manipulative mother's shady business dealings in Flint, Michigan, fourteen-year-old Luther keeps a sense of humor while running the Happy Neighbor Group Home For Men, all the while dreaming of going to college and becoming a philosopher.

The Canterbury Tales / Geoffrey Chaucer Often called the first book of poetry written in English, Chaucer's masterpiece is also the first anthology of English short fiction, one that will resonate with readers for as long as folly and courage, deceit and generosity, love and jealousy remain part of the human personality.

A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"

Code Name Verity / Elizabeth Wein In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage, and great courage as she relates what she must to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

The DaVinci Code / Dan Brown Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon and French cryptologist Sophie Neveu work to solve the murder of an elderly curator of the Louvre, a case which leads to clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci and a centuries-old secret society.

Dracula / Bram Stoker Dracula is one of the few horror books to be honored by inclusion in the Norton Critical Edition series. An 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, it introduced the famous character Count Dracula and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy.

Elsewhere / Gabrielle Zevin After fifteen-year-old Liz Hall is hit by a taxi and killed, she finds herself in a place that is both like and unlike Earth, where she must adjust to her new status and figure out how to "live."

Everything, Everything / Yoon, Nicola "The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more"--

Flip / Martyn Bedford A teenager wakes up inside another boy's body and faces a life-or-death quest to return to his true self or be trapped forever in the wrong existence.

Flowers for Algernon / Daniel Keyes A thirty-two-year-old man with an intellectual disability takes part in an innovative scientific experiment to raise his intelligence. Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with an unusually low IQ, he has been chosen as the perfect subject for an experimental surgery that researchers hope will increase his intelligence-a procedure that has already been highly successful when tested on a lab mouse named Algernon.

Go Set a Watchman / Harper Lee Twenty years after the trial of Tom Robinson, Scout returns home to Maycomb to visit her father and struggles with personal and political issues as her small Alabama town adjusts to the turbulent events beginning to transform the United States in the mid-1950s.

Godless / Pete Hautman When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.

Going bovine / Libba Bray After being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob (aka mad cow) disease, disaffected teenager Cameron Smith sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure.

The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck Oklahoma in the Thirties is a dustbowl and dispossessed farmers migrate westward to California. After terrible trials en route they become little more than slave labor. Among the throng are the Joads who refuse to knuckle under.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel / Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls presents a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed five hundred miles as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children.

The Handmaid's Tale / Margaret Atwood Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if their ovaries are viable. Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and literary tour de force.

Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" grew out of a journey Joseph Conrad took up the Congo River; the verisimilitude that the great novelist thereby brought to his most famous tale everywhere enhances its dense and shattering power. Apparently a sailor's yarn, it is in fact a grim parody of the adventure story, in which the narrator, Marlow, travels deep into the heart of the Congo where he encounters the crazed idealist Kurtz and discovers that the relative values of the civilized and the primitive are not what they seem. "Heart of Darkness" is a model of economic storytelling, an indictment of the inner and outer turmoil caused by the European imperial misadventure, and a piercing account of the fragility of the human soul.

The Hotel New Hampshire / John Irving "The first of my father's illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels." So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they "dream on" in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of "A Widow for One Year" and "The Cider House Rules."

Interview With The Vampire / Anne Rice A vampire recounts his tragic two-century life, marked by an endless thirst for human blood.

The Joy Luck Club / Amy Tan Encompassing two generations and a rich blend of Chinese and American history, the story of four struggling, strong women also reveals their daughter's memories and feelings. "Brilliant....Each story is a fascinating vignette, and together they they weave the reader through a world where the Moon Lady can grant any wish, where a child, promised in marriage at two and delivered at 12, can, with cunning, free herself; where a rich man's concubine secures her daughter's future by killing herself, and where a woman can live on, knowing she has lost her entire life." WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

*Kafka On The Shore / Haruki Murakami* Kafka on the Shore is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom.

As their paths converge, and the reasons for that convergence become clear, Haruki Murakami enfolds readers in a world where cats talk, fish fall from the sky, and spirits slip out of their bodies to make love or commit murder. Kafka on the Shore displays one of the world's great storytellers at the peak of his powers.

The Kindness Diaries / Leon Logothetis Follow the journey of a former stockbroker who leaves his unfulfilling desk job in search of a meaningful life. He sets out from Los Angeles on a vintage motorbike, determined to circumnavigate the globe surviving only on the kindness of strangers. Incredibly, he makes his way across the U.S., through Europe, India, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and finally to Canada and back to the Hollywood sign, by asking strangers for shelter, food, and gas. Inspired by The Motorcycle Diaries.

A Lesson Before Dying / Ernest J. Gaines Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940,. Jefferson, a young black man, is an unwitting party to a liquor store shootout in which three men are killed; the only survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Grant Wiggins, who left his hometown for the university, has returned to the plantation school to teach. As he struggles with his decision whether to stay or escape to another state, his aunt and Jefferson's godmother [persuade him to visit Jefferson in his cell and impart his learning and his pride to Jefferson before his death. In the end, the two men forge a bond as they both come to understand the simple heroism of resisting -and defying-the expected.

Light on Snow / Anita Shreve Twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon wonders after she and her widowed father discover a wailing abandoned baby in the snow-filled woods near their New Hampshire home. Through the days that follow, the Dillons and an unexpected visitor who soon turns up at their door-a young woman evidently haunted by her own terrible choices-face a thicket of decisions, each seeming to carry equal possibilities of heartbreak and redemption.

Little Brother / Cory Doctorow After being interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, uses his expertise in computer hacking to set things right.

Local Girls / Alice Hoffman From the New York Times best-selling author of The Dovekeepers , Alice Hoffman is at her haunting, thought-provoking best with these interconnected stories about a Long Island family, the Samuelsons, and the lessons in survival and transformation that life brings to every family.

The Lottery / Shirley Jackson

"The Lottery" is a short story by Shirley Jackson, written just months before its first publication, in the June 26, 1948, issue of The New Yorker. The story describes a fictional small town which observes an annual ritual known as "the lottery".

Love / Toni Morrison. The epitome of a group of women's ideals about love, fatherhood, and friendship, wealthy hotel owner Bill Cosey finds his life compromised by his troubled past and his feelings about a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

The International Bestseller and modern literary classic by Nobel Prize-Winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again. "A love story of astonishing power." - Newsweek

Lucas / by Kevin Brooks. On an isolated English island, fifteen-year-old Caitlin McCann makes the painful journey from adolescence to adulthood through her experiences with a mysterious boy, whose presence has an unsettling effect on the island's inhabitants.

Marley & Me / John Grogan Follows the life story of an exuberant Labrador retriever who gets into perpetual trouble and experiences a range of inspiring adventures, from shutting down an entire beach to guarding a seventeen-year-old neighbor after a stabbing attack.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children / Ransom Riggs A horrific family tragedy sends sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of an old orphanage that was home to children who were more than just peculiar, but possibly dangerous--and who may still be alive. Illustrated with vintage found photographs.

The Monstrumologist / William James Henry Edited by Rick Yancey In 1888, twelve-year-old Will Henry chronicles his apprenticeship with Dr. Warthrop, a scientist who hunts and studies real-life monsters, as they discover and attempt to destroy a pod of Anthropophagi.

The Natural / Bernard Malamud Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first--and some would say still the best--novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of post war Jewish life, took on very different material--the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era--and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which--now that he has done it!--looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."

The Odyssey / Homer A new translation of the epic poem retells the story of Odysseus's ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the Trojan War.

The Old Man in the Sea / Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal--a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss.

Olive Kitteridge / Elizabeth Strout The world of Olive Kitteridge, a retired school teacher in a small coastal town in Maine, is revealed in stories that explore her diverse roles in many lives, including a lounge singer haunted by a past love, her stoic husband, and her own resentful son.

Prep : a novel / Curtis Sittenfeld During the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves behind her close-knit, middle-class Indiana family to enroll in an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts, becoming a shrewd observer of, and eventually a participant in, their rituals and customs.

The Riverkeepers / John Cronin and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The authors describe their confrontations and eventual triumphs over environmental lawbreakers.

Shiver / Maggie Stiefvater In all the years she has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house, Grace has been particularly drawn to an unusual yellow-eyed wolf who, in his turn, has been watching her with increasing intensity.

Slam / Nick Hornby At the age of fifteen, Sam Jones's girlfriend gets pregnant and Sam's life of skateboarding and daydreaming about Tony Hawk changes drastically.

Snow Falling on Cedars / David Guterson In 1954, Ishmael Chambers, a local reporter who lost an arm in the war, covers the murder trial of a Japanese American fisherman, whose wife had been Ishmael's childhood sweetheart.

Songs for the Missing / Stewart O'Nan When a popular high-school student goes missing from her small Midwestern community, her loving parents, introverted sister, friends, and boyfriend devote themselves to finding her.

The Stranger / Albert Camus An ordinary man is unwittingly caught up in a senseless murder in Algeria. Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.".

The Time Traveler's Wife / Audrey Niffenegger Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.

Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zora Neale Hurston* Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe A simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places.

Tuesdays with Morrie / Mitch Albom A sportswriter conveys the wisdom of his late mentor, professor Morrie Schwartz, recounting their weekly conversations as Schwartz lay dying.

What Happened to Lani Garver / Carol Plum-Ucci The close-knit residents of Hackett Island have never seen anyone quite like Lani Garver. Everything about this new kid is a mystery: Where does Lani come from? How old is Lani? Is Lani a boy or a girl? Popular Claire McKenzie isn't up to tormenting Lani with the rest of the high school elite. Instead, she decides to befriend the intriguing outcast. But within days of Lani's arrival, tragedy strikes, and Claire is left questioning herself, her friendships, and, most interesting of all, the possibility that angels may exist on earth.

When the Emperor was Divine: A Novel / by Julie Otsuka. A story told from five different points of view, chronicles the experiences of Japanese Americans caught up in the nightmare of the World War II internment camps.

Where Men Win Glory / Jon Krakauer Traces the controversial story of NFL player and soldier Pat Tillman, describing the military's efforts to hide the truth about his death by friendly fire, in an account that draws on Tillman's journals and letters as well as interviews with family members and fellow soldiers.

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon the publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of fiction's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Set in the Caribbean, its heroine is Antoinette Cosway, a sensual and protected young woman who is sold into marriage to the prideful Rochester. In this best-selling novel, Rhys portrays a society so driven by hatred, so skewed in its sexual relations, that it can literally drive a woman out of her mind.

Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte A mysterious foundling raised at Wuthering Heights by the Earnshaw, Heathcliff is a wild as the moor itself. Catherine together, a cruel fire consumes them and the lives of those around them.