Independent Reading Recommendations for Juniors & Seniors
- Does not merely conform to the expectations of a single genre or formula.
- Has been judged to have artistic quality by the literary community (teachers, librarians, critics, the reading public).
- Has stood the test of time in some way, regardless of the date of publication.
- Shows thematic depth: The themes merit revisiting and study because they arecomplex and nuanced.
- Demonstrates innovation in style, voice, structure, characterization, plot and/ordescription.
- May have a social, political or ideological impact on society during the lifetime ofthe author or afterward.
- Is universal in its appeal (i.e., the themes and insights are not only accessible to oneculture or time period).
Contact me if you want to read a book and are unsure of its merit ().
English / HartnettRoy High School
Independent Reading Recommendations for Juniors & Seniors
A Dog’s Life by Peter Mayle*
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers*
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
A Thousand Splendid Suns by KhaledHosseini*
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green*
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Black Boy American Hunger by Richard Wright*
Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya*
Candide by Voltaire
Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Empire Falls by Richard Russo*
First They Killed My Father, A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers by UngLoung*
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
Grapes of Wrath by George Steinbeck
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Life of Pi by Yann Martel*
In Other Words by JhumpaLahiri*
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison*
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Native Son by Richard Wright*
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro*
O Pioneers by Willa Cather
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen*
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry*
1984 by George Orwell
Reading Lolita in Tehran by AzarNafisi*
Rockbound by Frank Parker Day*
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (read Hamlet first) by Tom Stoppard*
The Stranger by Albert Camus (trans: M. Ward)
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein*
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
The Chosen by Cham Potok
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Count of Monte Christo by Alexander Dumas
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak*
The Divine Comedy by Dante
The 5 People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Album*
The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy*
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Help by Kathryn Stockett*
The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy*
The Kite Runner by KhaledHosseini*
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks*
The Namesake by JhumpaLahiri*
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by S.Chbosky*
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver*
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
The Silverhand by Stephen Lawhead
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien*
The Watcher by Mark Olsen*
The Kite Runner by KhaledHosseini*
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Any Novels by:
Jane Austin,James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy, Zora Neale Hurston, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy,H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf
* published after 1990
English / HartnettRoy High School