INDEPENDENT READING

Book:  Fiction/Nonfiction

During the first half of this semester, you have the opportunity to discover a new author or select a novel by an author you have enjoyed in the past!  The purpose of this assignment is to present you with wide array of classic and contemporary fiction and nonfiction by authors born or raised in the United States.  With this diverse range of choices, I’m confident that you can find a text that matches your interests and lights a fire.  Look at this as an opportunity learn and grow as a reader and as a human!   

The list that follows is consists of winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature and winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It is also compiled from the College Board’s 101 Great Books for College-Bound Readers, The Modern Library’s 100 Great Novels, The American Library Association’s Outstanding Books for the College Bound.

Process

Today (2/15-16):  Consider this list. Create a top five list. Submit to DeBoy.

This Weekend:  Research the authors and titles on your Top Five List.  Pick one and get a copy, if possible.  If you’re really eager to get started, begin the book!

Next Week:  Bring your selection to class on Thursday/Friday.  On that day, you will set reading goals, and I will introduce the several imaginative project options.

(My apologies for the formatting and the smiley faces. I don’t know where they are coming from!)

Fiction

Agee, James                             A Death in the Family (1957)

Anderson, Sherwood               Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Baldwin, James            Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

Bellamy, Edward                      Looking Backward (1888)

Bellow, Saul                             Humbolt’s Gift (1976)

Buck, Pearl S.                          The Good Earth (1931)             

Card, Orson Scott                Ender’s Game (1985)

Cather, Willa                    Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927)

                                        My Antonia (1918)

Cisneros, Sandra             Caramelo (2002)

                                       The House on Mango Street (1991)

Crutcher, Chris             Whale Talk (2001)

Chopin, Kate                    The Awakening (1899)

Cooper, James Fenimore        The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

Crane, Stephen             The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

DeLillo, Don                  White Noise (1984)

Dorris, Micheal             A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987)

Dreiser, Theodore         An American Tragedy (1925)

                                     Sister Carrie (1900)

Ellison, Ralph                The Invisible Man (1953)

Faulkner, William           As I Lay Dying (1930)

                                      The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott                Tender is the Night (1934)

Gaines, Ernest                          A Lesson Before Dying (1993)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel                      The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Heller, Joseph                           Catch-22 (1961)

Hemingway, Ernest               A Farewell to Arms (1929)

                                            The Sun Also Rises (1926)

James, Henry                            The Turn of the Screw (1898)

Kennedy, William             Ironweed (1983)

Kerouac, Jack                          On the Road (1951)

Kingsolver, Barbara                        The Bean Trees (1998)

Kingston, Maxine Hong  The Woman Warrior; Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1975)

Lewis, Sinclair              Main Street (1920)  

London, Jack                           The Call of the Wild (1903)

McMurtry, Larry                Lonesome Dove (1986)

Melville, Herman                        Moby Dick (1951)

Momaday, M. Scott                House Made of Dawn (1969)

Morrison, Toni             Sula (1973)

                                    Beloved (1987)

O’Brien, Tim                            The Things They Carried (1990)

O’Connor, Flannery                  A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955)

Plath, Sylvia                              The Bell Jar (1963)

Poe, Edgar Allen                Selected Tales

Proulx, Annie E.                     The Shipping News 1994

Pynchon, Thomas                    The Crying of Lot 49 (1969)

Salinger, J.D.                            Franny and Zooey (1961)

Silko, Leslie Marmon                Ceremony (1975)

Sinclair, Upton              The Jungle (1906)

Steinbeck, John                        The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher            Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Tan, Amy                                 The Joy Luck Club (1989)

Twain, Mark                  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.                    Slaughterhouse-Five            (1969)

Walker, Alice                           The Color Purple (1982)

Wharton, Edith             The House of Mirth (1905)

Wright, Richard                        Native Son (1940)

Nonfiction

Asinof, Eliot       Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (1963)

Baldwin, James            Notes of a Native Son      (1955)

Bissinger, H.G.            Friday Night Lights: A Town, at Team, and a Dream (2003)

Blais, Madeleine            In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (1995)

Brown, Dee  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) 

Brumberg, Joan Jacobs The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997)

Capote, Truman              In Cold Blood (1961)

Cooke, Mervyn             The Chronicle of Jazz (1998)

Dillard, Annie              Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

Douglass, Frederick  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas  (1845)

DuBois, W.E.B.             The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903)

Due, Linnea             Joining the Tribe: Growing Up Gay and Lesbian in the ’90’s (1995)

Hersch, Patricia  A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence (1998) 

Humes, Edward No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court (1996) 

Jones, K. Maurice      Say It Loud! The Story of Rap Music (1994)

Kendall, Elizabeth      Where She Danced (1979)

Kozol, Jonathan.   Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (1991)

Malcolm X with Alex Haley The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

McPhee, John              In Suspect Terrain (1983)

Pipher, Mary                Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994)

Thomas, Lewis  The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Thoreau, Henry David   Walden (1854)

Williams, Juan.  Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (1987)

Independent Poetry Log/Journal

Keep a log of the poems you read.  Every three poems, select one for a closer reading and develop a journal response. 

Title: ______________________________

Author:____________________________

Source:______________________________

As you seek poems to read for your Independent Poetry Reading Log, Poetry Journal, and Poetry Analysis, you may consult the American Literature anthology in the classroom; however, you may also seek poetry online.  Two great sources are   

At Bartlby.com, you’ll find digital collections of several celebrated American poets, including Emily Dickenson, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, and Walt Whitman.  You’ll also find a few anthologies that contain a wider range of American poets (yet limited to the 19th century), including An American Anthology (1900) , The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Yale Book of American Verse (1919), and Modern American Poetry (1919).  Seek, and you shall find:  http://www.bartleby.com/verse/ .

At The Poetry Foundation’s website (www.poetryfoundation.org), you’ll find links to the poems of many older and contemporary American poets.  For those of you with no poets in mind, consider looking into the work of some of the following poets.  Each description that follows is quoted from The Poetry Foundation’s biography of each poet.  Search for poets by their last name at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/ tool.poet.html.

Poetry Journal Expectations

Excellent journals will

-Develop a minimum of four journal responses that are either typed and submitted to DeBoy or published on your student blog.

Excellent responses will

-Include the author and poem title and reach at least 150 words in length.

-Consider at least two of the questions above.

-Correctly apply two underlined literary terms.

-Quote the poem.

-Make some kind of text-to-self, text-to-text, or text-to-world connection.

-Include a word count at the end of the entry.

-Follow BHS Manuscript Requirements format.