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Summer Reading at MBA: AP English

Information on summer reading for all grades, including the all-school read.

AP English Summer Reading

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