Summer Reading Choices

1. Summer Reading Choices for next year’s RAHS 11th graders

2. Why read on summer break? • A 2006 study of ACT results showed that what makes some students ready for college (and others not ready) is an ability tounderstand difficult literature. • At RAHS, we want all of our students to be ready for college! • Therefore, ALL RAHS STUDENTS need to pick at least TWO books from the summer reading lists to stay in the practice of academic reading!

3. How do I choose? • It doesn’t matter which two titles you pick. Ask your English teacher what might be good choices for you. • There will be opportunities throughout your 11th grade English class to use this in writing and analysis work. • Talk to an English teacher about which choices might be best suited for you.

4. Solar Storms By Linda Hogan Angela Jensen, a troubled 17-year-old, narrates the tale of her return to Adam's Rib, an island town in the boundary waters between Minnesota and Canada. Tucked into a pristine landscape of countless islands, wild animals and desperately harsh winters, it's her Native American family's homeland. Hogan's finely tuned descriptions of the land and its spiritual significance draw a parallel between the ravages suffered by the environment and those suffered by Angela's mother.

5. American Primitive By Mary Oliver Mary Oliver's visionary poems enunciate the renewals of nature and the renewals of humanity in love, in oneness with the natural, in union with the things of this world. Lyrical and elegiac, Mary Oliver celebrates the primitive things of America – and the wilderness that survives.

6. Catch 22 By Joseph Heller This is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

7. Everything That Rises Must Converge By Flannery O’Connor This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

8. On the Road By Jack Kerouac While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject—the search for a place as an outsider in America. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, generosity, and chill dawns with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.

9. Sula By Toni Morrison Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sulais a work that overflows with life.

10. Gang Leader for a Day By SudhirVankatesh When first-year graduate student SudhirVenkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, he hoped to find a few people willing to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty--and impress his professors with his boldness. He never imagined that as a result of this assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade embedded inside the projects under JT’s protection.

11. The Latehomecomer By Kao Kalia Yang Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family’s captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. n search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others.

12. The Smartest Kids in the World and how they got that way By Amanda Ripley In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education superpowers? In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embedded in these countries for one year.

13. Swamplandia! By Karen Russell Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava sets out on a mission through the magical swamps to save them all, we are drawn into a lush and shimmering edge of reality.

14. As you read, please consider (and take notes on) the following: • What repetitions or patterns can you find in the book? • What life lessons does the book teach? • What motivates the specific characters? • Choose a passage (2-10 pages) you think is significant and explain its importance. • Keep track of questions you have as you read.