Required Summer Reading

Jefferson Parish Public School System

Magnet Schools

English II (Honors)

 

Directions: You MUST read at least three books from the list

below. Each of your three chosen books must come

from a different category: fiction, non-fiction, and

drama.

 

       Non-fiction

                        Hiroshima—John Hersey

Hiroshima is a non-fictional compilation of six separate interviews written in narrative form. The structure is a chronological narrative that follows the characters’ lives, from the morning history’s first atomic bomb fell to forty years later. In each chapter, the author jumps from one character to the next and then back again

Hersey impresses upon the reader how quickly everything changed when the atomic bomb devastated the city of Hiroshima.

 

Night—Eli Weisel

Because Hitler hated Jewish people, he caused them to be imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Night is a stark account of

the horrendous experiences of Elie Wiesel, the Jewish author, during Hitler's reign of terror. The book is a recording of man's inhumanity to man at its worst.

 

Tuesdays with Morrie—Mitch Albom

Tuesdays with Morrie is a series of journal entries written by a former Brandeis student who is accidentally reunited with his college teacher twenty years after graduation. Nearly all these journal entries are lessons about facing one’s death and living one’s life. Teacher and student decide to extend their visits over the remaining months of Morrie's limited life. Their Tuesday "seminars" explore perennial values: family, emotions, money, marriage, culture, and fear of aging.

 

 

The Book Thief—Markus Zusak

The Book Thief, set in Germany beginning in 1939, focuses on an abandoned German girl, Liesel, who is sent to foster parents in another area, a small town near Munich. As Liesel learns to cope with her new environment, all the gains she has endured, and the extreme unhappiness of pre-war and wartime Germany, she yearns to escape via reading.

 

Drama

                  The Piano Lesson—August Wilson

Inspired by Romare Bearden’s painting Piano Lesson, The Piano Lesson is set in Pittsburgh in 1936 and focuses upon the relationship between the Charles siblings, Berniece and Boy Willie, who clash over whether or not their family’s piano should be sold. This play explores African Americans’ relationship to family history, particularly to the history of their slave ancestors.

 

A Doll’s House—Henrik Ibsen

A Doll’s House is a drama depicting a woman’s need to be her own person, rather than the property of her husband. Nora’s self-reliance and independence shocked late nineteenth century audiences and foreshadowed the beginnings of a new age in dramatic literature.

                  Fiction

                 

A Lesson Before Dying—Ernest Gaines

 

 

In a rural town in Louisiana in the late 1940's a poorly educated young black man, Jefferson, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jefferson is unfairly convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair by a white judge and jury. His defense lawyer, in trying to stave off the death sentence, labels him a "hog"--and it is this label that Jefferson's godmother wants disproved. She enlists the help of the narrator of the novel, Grant Wiggins, the plantation school teacher, who unhappily agrees to her plan.

 

 

 

 

The Count of Monte Cristo—Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo is the exciting adventure story of a

young, noble boy named Edmond Dantes, a young honest sailor who directs the ship called the Pharaon after his captain has died.

Then, he is betrayed by two people he thought were his friends. Edmond is sentenced to life in the infamous dungeon, the Chateau d'If, and after fourteen hard years in jail plotting his revenge, he escapes.

 

 

 

 

                  The Bean Trees—Barbara Kingsolver

This novel follows the experiences of Marietta "Missy" Greer as she leaves her childhood home in Pittman, Kentucky. She heads west with a barely functioning Volkswagen Bug, determined to change her name according to the first place she has to stop. As she drives through the Cherokee Nation area of Oklahoma, her car breaks down, and an abused, abandoned baby girl is unloaded upon her. She takes refuge in a tire shop run by a woman named Mattie who gives her moral support and a job. Taylor learns that her own troubles are small compared to those of Estevan and Esperanza, a couple who have had to give up their daughter and are fleeing from both Guatemalan death squadrons and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.