Batavia High School Summer Reading 2012-2013
Summer is a time when students take a break from the grind of school, a time when students take it easy for a while to recharge their batteries. But it’s also a time to explore new ideas, and it’s good for students to keep their minds engaged so they don’t lose their intellectual edge by the time school reconvenes. Because of this, we require students to do some reading and writing during the summer.
All students will be accountable for reading the novel(s) and completing the summer reading assignment. This is due on the first day of school: Wednesday, August 29 2012. (Seniors taking AP English will receive a separate assignment)
**Students taking Honors levels courses (freshman, sophomores, and juniors) will be required to read more than one book and 2 double journal assignments.
This is your chance to make a fantastic first impression on your English teacher! Make sure that you come to class with a summer reading assignment that is neat, fulfills all requirements, and is representative of your conscientious nature as a student. Teachers will be analyzing your ability to follow directions and the level of thoughtfulness reflected in the assignment.
The Assignment: (100 pts)
Students will need to complete 6 double journal entries for the book he/she has chosen to read. Identify quotations that are particularly interesting from the book.
1. On one side of your column, please select six passages that illustrate the pinnacle moments of your character’s journey. You can also pick passages that describe your character (physical and personality). These passages from the text should correlate with the timeline of the book and, therefore, should move from the beginning to the end of the work. Your passage, since it is being taken directly from the book, should utilize quotation marks, and the page number in which the passage was found should appear after the quotation marks. (points will be deducted for missing page #’s)
2. For each passage, please use the other side of the double entry journal to explain why you chose those passages. Since only six passages are being selected, your explanation for each should be a well-developed paragraph in which you have thoroughly explained the reason for your selection. ****If you are taking Honors 9, Honors 10 or Honors 11, you will need to do 6 passages for each book you are reading so a total of 12 passages/explanations.
**Students should also return the signed parent letter in addition to the double journal entries.
***Teachers will assign additional requirements for summer reading during the first days of school.
The Books:
CP English 9 and English 9, Choose One:
- Night by Elie Wiesel
Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.
- The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Larson intertwines the true tale of the 1893 World’s Fair and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history and the thrills of the best fiction.
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Page
Henrietta Lacks, a poor Southern tobacco farmer, was buried in an unmarked grave sixty years ago. Yet her cells – taken without her knowledge – became one of the most important tools in medical research. Known to science as HeLa, the first “immortal” human cells grown in culture are still alive today, and have been bought and sold by the millions. Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to East Baltimore today, where Henrietta’s family struggles with her legacy.
Honors English 9, Read both:
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The classic studyof human naturewhich depictsthe degenerationof a groupof schoolboys marooned on a desert island after a plane crash.
- Unwind by Neil Shusterman
In a society where unwanted teens are salvaged for their body parts, three runaways fight the system that would “unwind” them Connor’s parents want to be rid of him because he’s a troublemaker. Risa has no parents and is being unwound to cut orphanage costs. Lev’s unwinding has been planned since his birth, as part of his family’s strict religion. Brought together by chance, and kept together by desperation, these three unlikely companions make a harrowing cross-country journey, knowing their lives hang in the balance. If they can survive until their eighteenth birthday, they can’t be harmed — but when every piece of them, from their hands to their hearts, are wanted by a world gone mad, eighteen seems far, far away.
CP English 10 and English 10, Choose One:
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist.
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. But when a misunderstanding arises, their deep friendship suddenly threatens to tear apart.
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel–a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
Honors English 10, Read both:
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
A New England farmer must choose between his duty to care for his invalid wife and his love for her cousin.
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Lamott’s ( Operating Instructions ) miscellany of guidance and reflection should appeal to writers struggling with demons large and slight. Among the pearls she offers is to start small, as their father once advised her 10-year-old brother, who was agonizing over a book report on birds: “Just take it bird by bird.” Lamott’s suggestion on the craft of fiction is down-to-earth: worry about the characters, not the plot.
CP English 11 and English 11, Choose One:
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and each other.
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathon Safron Foer
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of New York. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring Oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey.
- The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
For two decades, MSNBC.com contributor Jeannette Walls hid her hardscrabble past as the child of two rebellious nonconformists (who sometimes put painting before parenting). With her riveting memoir, The Glass Castle, Walls breaks her silence to reveal a triumphant story of strength, success, and unconditional love.
Honors English 11, Read both:
- Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.
- The Corrections by Jonathon Franzen
Jonathan Franzen’s exhilarating novel The Corrections tells a spellbinding story with sexy comic brio, and evokes a quirky family akin to Anne Tyler’s, only bitter. Franzen’s great at describing Christmas homecomings gone awry, cruise-ship follies, self-deluded academics, breast-obsessed screenwriters, stodgy old farts and edgy Tribeca bohemians equally at sea in their lives, and the mad, bad, dangerous worlds of the Internet boom and the fissioning post-Soviet East.
CP British Literature/English 12, Choose One:
- Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro
A moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love. As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
- Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind
It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric has almost no friends. He eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition–which is fully supported by his forceful mother–is to attend a top-flight college.
In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.
- Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head.
