Summer Reading List English IV AP 2023-24
I. Each senior Advanced Placement student is required to read the two books below. These novels will be quizzed the first week of school and will be the basis of the year’s first theme:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Toni Morrison, Beloved
II. Both students and faculty will also read Neal Bascomb’s The Race of the Century: The Battle to Break the Four-Minute Mile, this summer’s All School Read. Please check the LibGuide link for instructions on how to complete the assignment for The Race of the Century.
III. Each student must also read one book from the optional list below. This book will serve as the basis for an essay written in response to an AP topic to be assigned on the first day of class.
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
White Noise, Don DeLillo
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Cry, The Beloved Country, Alan Paton
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf