Summer Reading List English IV AP 2025-26
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
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
II. Both students and faculty will also read The Confident Mind: The Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakeable Performance by Dr. Nate Zinsser.
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.
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
White Noise, Don DeLillo
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Washington Black, Esi Edugyan
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf