Independent+Novels

Independent Novels **AP Reading List**

//During the course of the summer and the academic year, you must choose novels from the following list to read.// **//DO NOT//** //select a novel which you have already read in a previous class or independently. Those novels with lines through the titles will be taught during the year. You may request an alternate title from an author listed or an alternate author, but you// **//MUST//** //receive approval beforehand. Hold on to this list for the entire year.//

**Chinua Achebe**: //Things Fall Apart// **Aeschylus**: the //Oresteia// **Aristophanes**: //Lysistrata// **Jane Austen**: //Pride and Prejudice// **Samuel Beckett**: //Waiting for Godot// **Bertolt Brecht**: //Mother Courage and Her Children// **Charlotte Bronte**: //Jane Eyre// **Emily Bronte**: //Wuthering Heights// **Albert Camus**: //The Stranger// **Anton Chekhov**: //The Cherry Orchard// **Kate Chopin**: //The Awakening// **Joseph Conrad**: //Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Victory// **Daniel Defoe**: //Moll Flanders// **Charles Dickens**: //David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities// **Feodor Dostoevski**: //Crime and Punishment// **Theodore Dreiser**: //An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie// **Ralph Ellison**: //Invisible Man// **Euripides**: //Medea// **William Faulkner**: //As I Lay Dying, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury// **Henry Fielding**: //Joseph Andres// **F. Scott Fitzgerald**: //The Great Gatsby// **Gustave Flaubert**: //Madame Bovary// **E. M. Forster**: //A Passage to India// **William Golding**: //Lord of the Flies// **Thomas Hardy**: //Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles// **Nathaniel Hawthorne**: //The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables// **Joseph Heller**: //Catch-22// **Lillian Hellman**: //The Little Foxes// **Ernest Hemingway**: //The Sun Also Rises// **Zora Neale Hurston**: //Their Eyes Were Watching God// **Jonathan Swift**: //Gulliver’s Travels// **Leo Tolstoi**: //Anna Karenina// **Mark Twain**: //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn// **Voltaire**: //Candide// **Kurt Vonnegut**: //Slaughterhouse Five// **Alice Walker**: //The Color Purple// **Evelyn Waugh**: //The Loved One// **Edith Wharton**: //Ethan Frome, The House of Mirth// **Oscar Wilde**: //The Importance of Being Earnest// **Thornton Wilder**: //Our Town// **Aldous Huxley**: //Brave New World// **Henrik Ibsen**: //A Doll’s House, An Enemy of the People, Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck// **Henry James**: //The Turn of the Screw, Washington Square// **James Joyce**: //A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man// **Franz Kafka**: //Metamorphosis, The Trial// **D.H. Lawrence**: //Sons and Lovers// **Sinclair Lewis**: //Main Street// **Gabriel Garcia Marquez**: //One Hundred Years of Solitude// **Herman Melville**: //Billy Budd, Moby Dick// **Arthur Miller**: //All My Sons, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman// **Toni Morrison**: //Beloved, Song of Solomon// **Flannery O’Connor**: //Wise Blood// **Eugene O’Neill**: //The Hairy Ape, Long Day’s Journey into Night// **George Orwell**: //Animal Farm,// //1984// **Alan Paton**: //Cry, the Beloved Country// **Jean Rhys**: //Wide Sargasso Sea// **Jean-Paul Sartre**: //No Exit// **William Shakespeare**: //Hamlet// //, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night// **George Bernard Shaw**: //Major Barbara, Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalian// **Mary Shelley**: //Frankenstein// **Sophocles**: //Antigone, Oedipus Rex// **John Steinbeck**: //The Grapes of Wrath// **Tom Stoppard**: //Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead// **August Strindberg**: //Miss Julie// **Tennessee Williams**: //The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire// **Virginia Woolf**: //To the Lighthouse// **Richard Wright**: //Native Son// **J.D. Salinger**: //Catcher in the Rye//

PREVIOUS YEARS' OPTIONS

Throughout the year, you need to choose 4 independent novels to read from the AP Reading list (posted on the wiki). For each novel, you need to choose one project to complete, which will be worth 100 points.

These should be selected from the following list:



Projects you may choose: //** Compose a blog. **// You can format your blog in the following ways: ~ Daily entry: for each reading, you will compose an entry that briefly summarizes, then reflects on the reading in the reader/audience response context. For the final entry, you would reflect more critically about the meaning of the work as a whole, paying attention to author style and author purpose. ~ Summative: after finishing the book, you will summarize the text briefly, analyze the characterization of the book, identify the major motifs and themes, and cite examples of literary elements and/or rhetorical devices that create the motifs and themes. //**Compose a newspaper**// that reviews the novel and reflects articles related to the events or characters of the novel. //**Respond to a previous AP prompt.**// Choose one of the prompts from the document below and write a well-organized essay in response based on your novel. //**Create a movie trailer**//. It should be 2-3 minutes in length. Remember, the purpose of a trailer is to garner audience interest without spoiling plot. Your trailer should accurately reflect the mood and theme of the novel. //**Create a slideshow presentation**// in which you present critical information about the biography of the author, historical context of the novel/play, and analysis of author style. //**Create a mini-documentary.**// Similar to the slideshow, except this will be in documentary-format. //**Create a storybook.**// Re-tell the story to a younger audience by creating a storybook. //**Create a Sparknotes/Cliffnotes website**//. Google sites is a great place for this. Also, your wiki would be a great place as well.

While you are reading the novel, you are going to be maintaining a blog (see @Blogging on how to set this up) that does four things: 1. Summarizes major plot points. 2. Describes main characters. 3. Identifies major motifs and themes. 4. Identifies prevalent literary elements and rhetorical devices.

Go to this site to set up your blog page.

You can choose to do this one of two ways: A. Blog as you read. Perhaps every 2 chapters or every 50 pages, create a blog entry that encompasses the four areas above. Pros to this approach are that it is easier to remember the elements and devices as well as characterization nuances as you move through the book rather than waiting until the end. It is also interesting to see how your perception changes throughout the novel. B. One blog at the end. This approach is seemingly less time-consuming, though I would argue it might force you to go back through the novel and thus actually require more time. Pros for this approach are that the motifs and themes are clearer and the summary might be less cumbersome.

// I do not require one over the other; the goal is for you to create a page that will help you review for the AP test and prepare for your Graduation Project presentation, also in May. You should choose the approach that will be most successful for you. //

The blog will be due on the day the novel is to be read. (See the calendar on the home page!) On that day, we will have a timed writing in which you will choose a prompt from the list and respond using the novel as your primary source. The timed writing questions you have from which to choose are: