AP Literature Extra Credit/ Enrichment Activity

1. AP LiteratureExtra Credit/ Enrichment Activity K. Matteson Fall 2010

2. The Assignment: • Choose one of the following books: • Annotate the book. You must turn in your copy to me with at least two annotations per page. Underlined sections do not count as annotations. • Complete a Reader’s Notebook (See document attached to blog) • Sit down for a brief interview with Matteson ALL parts of this assignment are due December 17th!

3. The Books:

4. Atonement by Ian McEwan --With its intricate backward fairy tales, its deliciously stagy scenes, its telescoped time scheme, its forest of allusions, its narrative once-overs and doublings-back, its sharp questions about the experience of fiction, Ian McEwan's "Atonement" seems less a story than a soulful game.(Entertainment Weekly)

5. Beloved by Toni Morrison In Toni Morrison's new novel, ''Beloved,'' a runaway slave, her capture imminent, slashes her infant daughter's throat rather than see the child in chains. ''It was absolutely the right thing to do,'' Ms. Morrison said, ''but she had no right to do it. I think if I had seen what she had seen, and knew what was in store, and I felt that there was an afterlife - or even if I felt that there wasn't - I think I would have done the same thing.”

6. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley One of the best-known horror stories ever. Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, has a great ambition: to create intelligent life. But when his creature first stirs, he realizes he has made a monster. A monster which, abandoned by its maker and shunned by everyone who sees it, dogs Dr Frankenstein with murder and horrors to the very ends of the earth . .

7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be with is the one person you can't be without.

8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out - Publisher’s Weekly His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening, and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book of the year, period. - The San Francisco Chronicle

9. A Lesson before Dying by Ernest Gaines This is a straightforward novel, that masterfully evokes a time and a place and a community that was forced to bear inhuman injustices.  The dignified manner in which a simple man rises up and, with courage and grace,  accepts the burden of man's inhumanity to man makes for an uplifting tale of the triumph of the the human spirit.

10. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett "With the right soundtrack, with the right singer singing the right music, all battlefields can become utopias." — The Los Angeles Times Book Review "The most romantic novel in years. A strange, terrific, spellcasting story." — San Francisco Chronicle