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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   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