Summer Reading- Seniors

1. Summer Reading- Seniors 2012-2013

2. Required for Accelerated *available on Kindle & Nook • Available on Amazon for $10 • 1-2 copies available at local libraries from Chester County to Paoli Hamlet’s Blackberry • Always connected. • Anytime. • Anyplace. • We know it’s a blessing, but we’re starting to notice that it’s also a curse. In Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers helps us understand what being ‘connected’ disconnects us from, and offers wise advice about what we can do about it…. A thoughtful, elegant, and moving book.”

3. Requiredfor Academic A Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence By Paul Feig Adult/High School-Readers will find plenty to relate to in these true stories of teacher's pets, proms, and riding the school bus. The book succeeds because of the universality of the situations. Feig is not the first person to hate gym class, nor will he be the last, but he recounts his various experiences so vividly that a situation as common as snooping for presents in a parent's closet takes on an extra level of paranoia and humor.

4. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #1 Available on Kindle & Amazon ($6.99) Also assigned in past years if you have an older sibling (who graduated in 2010 or earlier) • I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing up in the Holocaust by LiviaBitton-Jackson In a graphic present-tense narrative, this Holocaust memoir describes what happens to a Jewish girl who is 13 when the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. She tells of a year of roundups, transports, selections, camps, torture, forced labor, and shootings, then of liberation and the return of a few. *If you are a struggling reader and enjoy Holocaust stories, this may be a wise choice for you. *

5. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #2 • Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley • Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. • The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. • The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening.

6. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #3 Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris • Welcome to the curious mind of David Sedaris, where dogs outrank children, guitars have breasts, and French toddlers unmask the inadequacies of the American male. • Sedaris inhabits this world as a misanthrope chronicling all things petty and small. • In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris is as determined as ever to be nobody's hero--he never triumphs, he never conquers--and somehow, with each failure, he inadvertently becomes everybody's favorite underdog.

7. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #4 Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell Four US Navy SEALS departed one clear night in early July 2005 for the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border for a reconnaissance mission. Their task was to document the activity of an al Qaeda leader rumored to be very close to Bin Laden with a small army in a Taliban stronghold. Five days later, only one of those Navy SEALS made it out alive.

8. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #5 The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls * has been on summer reading for two years- many have copies / Available on Kindle / at library Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

9. Choices for Accelerated & Academic A #6 Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.