AP Recommended Reading List
AP Recommended Reading List
?:Beowulf Sr.
Achebe, Chinua:Things Fall Apart (set in Africa)
Adams, Douglas:The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (difficult/action/absurd comedy/stream of con.)
Aeschylus:The Oresteia
The Eumenides
Agee, James:A Death in the Family
Albee, Edwards:The Zoo Story
Who’s Afraid of Verginia Woolf?
Anaya Rudolfo:Bless Me, Ultima
Aristophanes:Lysistrata
Arnot, Harriet:The Dollmaker (creepy/gothic/mysterious)
Atwood, Margaret:The Handmaid’s Tale (feminist slant/futuristic horror)
Cat’s Eye (life seen from a cat’s perspective)
Austen, Jane:Emma
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice (class distinction/courting/love)
Baldwin, James:Go Tell It on the Mountain (spiritual journey)
Beck, Martha:Expecting Adam (tear jerker/ philosophical/down syndrome baby)
Beckett, Samuel:Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul:The Adventures of Augie March
Henderson the Rain King (quirky/search for identity/set in Africa/SC/difficult)
Bradbury, Ray:Fahrenheit 451 Soph.
Dandelion Wine
Bragg, Rick:All Over But the Shoutin (memoir/ alcohol & poverty/laugh & cry)
Brecht, Berthold:Mother Courage and Her Children
Bronte, Charlotte:Jane Eyre (girl comes of age through many obstacles)
Bronte, Emily:WutheringHeights (class distinction/love/jealousy and its effects)
Bulosan, Carlos:America is in the Heart
Camus, Albert: The Stranger
Cather, Willa:Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Saavedra, Miguel de:Don Quixote de la Mancha (humorous/parody on chivalry)
Chaucer, Geoffrey:The Canterbury Tales Sr.
Chekhov, Anton:The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate:The Awakening (going against societal expectations during women’s repression)
Collins, WilkieThe Moonstone
Conrad, Joseph:Heart of Darkness Sr. (evil of men’s hearts)
Lord Jim
Cooper, James Fenimore:The Last of the Mohicans
Dante:Inferno Sr.
Defoe, Daniel:Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles:Bleak House
David Copperfield
Great Expectations (Expectations thwarted/class distinction/dark humor)Fr.
Hard Times
A Tale of Two Cities (mystery/government cover-ups/injustices/family struggles)
Dostoevski, Fyodor:The Brothers Karamazov
Crime and Punishment
Notes from the Underground
Dreiser, Theodore:An American Tragedy
Sister Carrie
Eliot, George:The Mill on the Floss
Eliot, T.S.:The Wasteland
Murder in the Cathedral
Ellison, Ralph:Invisible Man
Erdrich, Louise:Love Medicine
Faulkner, William:As I Lay Dying
The Bear
Light in August
The Sound and the Fury Jr. (aristocratic family’s demise/stream of consciousness)
Fielding, Henry:Joseph Andrews
Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott:The Great Gatsby Jr.
Flaubert, Gustave:Madame Bovary
Forster, E. M.:A Passage to India
Gaines, Ernest:A lesson Before Dying
Garcia-Marquez, Gabriel:One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins“The Yellow Wallpaper” ( repressed intellectual woman’s struggle in early 1900)
Golding, William:Lord of the Flies Sr.(coming of age/evil of man’s heart)
Greene, Graham:Brighton Rock
The Power and the Glory
Hansberry, Loraine:A Raisin in the Sun
Hardy, Thomas:Jude, the Obscure
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel:House of Seven Gables (superstition /Salem witch trials)
The Scarlet Letter Jr. (societal expectations on women/double standards)
Heller, Joseph:Catch-22 (political satire/setting-war)
Hellman, Lillian:The Little Foxes
Watch on the Rhine
Hemingway, Ernest:A Farewell to Arms (war setting/love story)
The Sun Also Rises
Homer:The Iliad Fr.
The Odyssey Fr.
Hosseini, KhaledThe Kite Runner
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Hurston, Zora:Their Eyes Were Watching God Jr. (black woman’s struggle/self discovery/love)
Huxley, Aldous:Brave New World (Science Fiction/political &social satire)
Hwang, David Henry:M. Butterfly
Ibsen, Henrik:A Doll’s House
An Enemy of the People
Hedda Gabler
James, Henry:Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
The Turn of the Screw
Washington Square
Jonson, Ben:Volpone
Joyce, James:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The Dead
Kafka, Franz:The Metamorphosis (Boy’s struggle to be accepted)
The Trial
Kingston, Maxine Hong:Woman Warrior
Knowles, John:A Separate Peace
Kogawa, Joy:Obasan
Laurence, Margaret:The Diviners
The Stone Angel
Praisesong for the Widow
Lawrence, D.H.:Sons and Lovers
The Optimist’s Daughter
Lee, Chang-Rae:Native Speaker
Lee, Harper:To Kill a Mockingbird Jr. (injustice & prejudice/coming of age/child’s perspective)
Lewis, Sinclair:Main Street
Babbit
London, Jack:The Call of the Wild
MacCarthy, Cormac:All the Pretty Horses
MacLeish, Archibald:J.B.
Maclennan, Hugh:The Watch That Ends the Night
Mann, Thomas:The MagicMountain
Marlowe, Christopher:Doctor Faustus (man sells his soul to the devil)
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia:One Hundred Years of Solitude
Martel, YannLife of Pi
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
McCullers, Carson:Member of the Wedding
Melville, Herman:Benito Cereno
Billy Bud
Moby Dick (man against nature)
Bartleby the Scrivener
Redburn
Miller, Arthur:All My Sons
The Crucible Jr.
Death of a Salesman
Milton, John:Paradise Lost Sr.
Moliere:Tartuffe
The Misanthrope
Momaday, N. Scott:House Made of Dawn
Morrison, Toni:Beloved Sr. (spiritual/black struggle)
The Bluest Eye (search for identity of a black girl)
Song of Solomon
Sula
Mukerjee, Bharati:Jasmine
O’Connor, Flannery:Wise Blood (young man search for identity/spiritual struggle/strange)
O’Neill, Eugene:Desire Under the Elms
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Okada, John:No-No Boy
Orwell, George:Nineteen Eighty-FourSoph. (political satire/dystopian society/rebellion)
Animal Farm (political satire/personification of animals)
Pasternak, Boris:Doctor Zhivago
Paton, Alan:Cry, the Beloved Country Sr.
Pinter, Harold:The Birthday Party
The Caretaker
The Homecoming
Pope, Alexander:The Rape of the Lock (social satire/dark humor)
Racine:Phedre
Rhys, Jean:Wide Sargasso Sea
Richardson, Samuel:Pamela
Richler, Mordecai:Apprenticeship of Duddy Kracitz
Salinger, J.D.:The Catcher in the Rye
Sartre, Jean-Paul:No Exit (play)
Shaffer, Peter:Equus (play/insanity of a young man?/societal expectations gone bad)
Shakespeare, William: All plays
Steinbeck, John:The Grapes of Wrath (Setting: Great Depression/farming family’s struggle)
East of Eden (family favoritism/disfuction/relationships)
Tortilla Flats (cultural parody)
Of Mice and Men (friendship/mentally challenged)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher:Uncle Tom’s Cabin (slavery)
Swift, Jonathan:Gulliver’s Travels (social/political satire)
Tolstoy, Leo:War and Peace
Twain, Mark:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (boy’s coming of age/adventure)Jr.
Wilson, Steven E.Winter in Kandahar
Voltaire:Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.:Slaughterhouse-Five