English 11 Honors – Mrs. McGlinchy
Independent Reading Assignment for 2nd 9 weeks

Directions: You will read two books outside of class during the last nine weeks of the school year. You will need to pick two novels from this list, representing two different literary time periods. You must pick at least one book from Romanticism or Realism.

Romanticism:
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
The House of Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne

Realism:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
O Pioneers – Willa Cather
Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

Modernism
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Winesburg, OH – Sherwood Anderson
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

Post-Modernism
Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller

Contemporary Fiction
The Right Stuff – Tom Wolfe
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
Beloved – Toni Morrison
In the Time of Butterflies – Julia Alvarez
White Noise – Don DeLillo
The Cider House Rules – John Irving
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Jonathan Safran Foer
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

Assignment for Books
For each book you choose, you need to complete the following assignments:

1.  Create a double-entry journal with twenty entries. Each entry needs to include a quote or passage from the book and your reactions to the quote or passage. Below is an example.

Quotations / Reflections
"To be awake is to be alive." (from "Where I Lived and What I Lived For" / I think that you can go through your whole life asleep if you don't stop and think about what you're doing. It's important to make conscious choices, especially when you're my age.
"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this by the narrowness of my experience." (from "Economy") / I disagree with what Thoreau says here. I think that you can know another person as well as you know yourself. I know my best friend as well as I know myself. Sometimes, I don't think I know myself well at all.

2.  Either a description of the plot or a focus on character

a.  Plot – include a description of the exposition, including setting and characters; include five elements of rising action; identify the climax/turning point; include three elements of falling action; and describe the resolution

b.  Character – pick four main characters from the novel – Describe each character in at least one paragraph and explain how each character’s actions affect the plot

3.  On the due date for each book (1st book must be finished by April 25th and your 2nd book by May 23rd) you will write an in-class essay on how the book reflects the time period in which it was written

4.  Your double-entry journal and focus on plot or character will be due on the same due dates – April 25th and May 23rd