12th Grade Summer Reading Assignment

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Due Date:

·         The first day of school!

 

 

The Assignment:

·         Read at least one book from the following list and thoroughly complete the attached Outside Reading Book Sheet.

·         If you’re not sure about a book, amazon.com has additional summaries and reader reviews.

 

 

·         Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

I’ll confess to being a complete nonfan of comic books, but I still stayed up late to read this story of two teenaged Jewish comic book artists.  In 1939, Joe Kavalier smuggles himself out of Nazi-controlled Europe in a coffin and ends up in the Brooklyn home of his cousin Sammy Clay.  Together the two boys dream up The Escapist, a Houdini-like superhero whose mission is to “break the chains of injustice”.  The comic is a wild success, and along the way both cousins meet their true loves, but the shadow of World War II looms over their happiness.

 

·         Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist.

This is a perfect introduction to the Dickens Universe, a semi-surreal version of Victorian England where everyone has a name like “Chuzzlewit”, strangers will inevitably turn out to be long-lost relatives, and every thirty pages ends in a cliffhanger because Dickens published in monthly installments.  In this book, sweet little orphan Oliver is booted out of the workhouse after making the unfortunate dining hall request “Please, sir, I want some more”.  Adrift in London, Oliver encounters various sinister members of the city’s criminal underworld.  Can our pure-hearted hero survive with his limbs and conscience intact?  Wait until next month.

 

·         Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo.

Set in 19th century France, this novel tells the story of Edmond Dantes, whose idyllic youth is cut short when three very bad men frame him for treason and have him condemned to a hellish prison.  Decades later, Edmond appears in Paris with a new name, a bottomless fortune, and a burning desire for capital-R Revenge!  Like any good soap opera, the book is filled with cliffhangers, miraculous coincidences, and poetic justice.  If you’ve seen the inferior film versions you don’t know the whole story.

 

·         Forster, E.M. A Room With a View.

Most of Forster’s novels are tinged with tragedy, but this sparkling comedy of manners is the exception.  Set at the turn of the 20th century, it tells the story of young Lucy Honeychurch and her two suitors: bohemian George, who’s given to spontaneous poetry recitations, skinny-dipping, and grand romantic gestures, and smug Cecil, who has snobbery down to an art form and sees Lucy merely as another pretty collectible.  Will our heroine follow social conventions, or can true love win out in the end?

 

·         Marquez, Gabriel Garcia.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.  

Highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time (a “tragicomedy), One Hundred Years of Solitude  is Marquez’ Nobel-prize winning masterpiece which dares to depict the variety of life, the endlessness of death, and the search for peace and truth.  Though this is a tale of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family, universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez weaves the political, personal, and spiritual into this work.  This is one to have under your belt before heading off to college!

 

·         Martel, Yann. Life of Pi.

Imagine the movie Cast Away, except Tom Hanks is the sixteen-year-old son of an Indian zookeeper, and Wilson the volleyball is a hungry Bengal tiger.  When the ship carrying Pi, his family, and a menagerie of zoo animals goes down, the young man survives for months on a tiny lifeboat, battling despair, learning to live off the sea, and forging an uneasy truce with his feline companion.  This is no sappy, Disneyfied boy and his tiger tale; Pi’s account of his ordeal is alternately terrifying, darkly comic, mystical, and inspiring.

 

·         Morrison, Toni.  Song of Solomon.

 Do you like magical realism?  Do you like novels that expose the mysterious primal essence of family bond and conflict?  In 1931, Macon Dead III, later nicknamed Milkman, is prematurely brought into the world, the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, just after his mother witnesses the brief flight of a man determined to fly from the cupola of the hospital. Morrison explores the lasting stamp of slavery; the intimate culture of women; the idea of one's "people"; the violence of civil rights; and many more issues facing blacks of the times and today. Morrison plunges her readers into these characters’ lives and hearts with humanity and skill. As is true with all of her work, Morrison embeds this novel with haunting and enduring images.

 

·         O’Neill, Jamie. At Swim, Two Boys.

A novel about the universal struggle to be free in all senses of the word, this is truly the most moving book I’ve read in recent years.  It tells the story of two Irish teen-agers who fall in love amidst the backdrop of World War I and Ireland’s burgeoning fight for independence from England.  The book is by turns comic and tragic, tender and disturbing, intimate and epic.  It’s also written in a gorgeous, lyrical style; the Irish speech patterns are a little tricky at first but quite lovely once you get used to them. 

 

·         Patchett, Ann. Bel Canto.

In an unnamed South American country, a wealthy businessman’s birthday party, graced by the presence of a peerless opera soprano, is taken over by guerilla revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government.  The ensuing hostage crisis sounds like the set up for Die Hard 4, but the opposite is true; the book focuses on character rather than action, detailing the complex tangle of relationships formed under extreme circumstances.  Despite the subject matter, the novel’s smooth, flowing style has a singularly soothing effect on the reader.

 

·         Pears, Iain. An Instance of the Fingerpost.

Don’t let the weird title discourage you; it’s explained in the end.  This book is a murder mystery set in seventeenth-century England, when justice was most definitely not blind, blood transfusions were akin to the black arts, and a man’s choice of wig was a very important decision.  The unique aspect of this novel is its point of view; the book is divided into four sections, with four different narrators recounting their versions of the same events.  By the end, only the reader knows the whole truth.

 

·         Tartt, Donna. The Secret History.

Fitzgerald’s style meets Faulkner’s baroquely dysfunctional characters in this novel set in a small Northeastern college.  The book begins with a murder, but unlike most mysteries, we know who did it; the rest of the book details the events leading up to the crime and its aftermath.  Our lonely narrator Richard- picture Nick Carraway in college- transfers schools and falls in with a small group of Classics students bound together by love, hate, and several very dark secrets.  The suspense tightens as the book goes on; the worse things get for the characters, the harder it is to stop reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Name ________________________

Date _________________________

 

Outside Reading Book Sheet

 

Title:

Author:

Number of Pages:

 

I. Plot: basic storyline, significant events/scenes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II. Characters: specific names, dominant personality traits, relationships

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

III. Setting: time period, specific places and their physical/symbolic roles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IV. Themes: list as many as you can with brief commentary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V. Style: comment on choices such as: author’s choice of narrator, novel’s structure- is it chronological, etc., distinctive use of language, tone, etc.