Welcome to IB English 12: HL Language and Literature! We’re excited to meet you in September!
We highly recommend that you purchase your own copies of the novels we will read next year. Having your own copies allows you to make personal connections with the text and solidify your knowledge of the works. It enables you to practice the close reading skills required by IB, and it will make it much easier for you when it comes to written tasks, performance assessments, and studying for the IB Paper 2 exam.Note that you will be required to read over vacations and breaks in this class, due to our compressed time schedule (we finish our curriculum by the first week in May).
With this in mind, here is a list of the books we will read next year. We will analyze many short stories, speeches, poems, visual texts and films as well as these four major works.Feel free to purchase any version you wish.Half Price Books and Amazon’s used book resources are great ways to find inexpensive copies.
Hamlet byWilliam Shakespeare (ISBN-10:0300101058)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf(ISBN-10: 0156907399)
The Reader by Bernard Schlink (ISBN-10:9780375707971)
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (ISBN-10:038549081X)
NOTE: Several of these textsare all available as free e-texts, which, if you have an e-reader that allows you to annotate, can also be a suitable choice.
If you’re interested in keeping your mind sharp with some optional summer reading, we recommend you don’t pre-read the books we’ll teach next year—read broadly and for fun following your own genre and form interests; pursue text complexity that will broaden your mind. Some of these amazing texts we’ve taught in IB 11 and 12 in past years during our Literature course might be great choices:
- Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
- Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue
- Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
- Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard
- Narayan’s The Guide
- Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
- Wilson’s Fences
- Ninh’s The Sorrow of War
- Huxley’sBrave New World
- Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle
- Allende’s The House of the Spirits
- Chopin’s The Awakening
Another great way to keep your mind in a literary mode this summer is to see a free production of Shakespeare in the Park! During thesummer months, Seattle Shakespeare Company presents free, outdoor productions of classical plays performed in parks throughout the Puget Sound region. Grab a picnic and join them for either The Merry Wives of Windsor or King Lear! No tickets needed. Click here for times and locations.
Have a great summer!Your IB English 12 teachers—Mrs. Mathenyand Mrs. Boas
Remember, the teacher who sent you this email won’t necessarily be your teacher next fall. #chill