Northern Highlands Regional High School
Summer Reading Choices for Basic Literature about Society
You will have a summer reading assignment to prepare you for the genres and topics we will be discussing in Literature about Society. As an upper classman, you are aware of what is expected of you when you read. Keep this in mind when reading your choice book.
Note: You must choose ONE book that you have never read before.
Below you will find two books. Here is what you need to do:
· Select a book that interests you. Choose one of the books on the following page and read it over the summer. Consult the book reviews on the Bergen County Cooperative Library System site (www.bccls.org), look at customer reviews on Amazon.com or other websites, or browse through the books in a library or bookstore. You will be reading this book, taking notes on it, and writing about it, so take your time and choose something you will enjoy.
· As you read, mark your text. Using a highlighter (if you own the book!), Post-it notes, or the reading logs on my website, select quotations that interest you, turning points for characters, and other important moments in the book. Write questions and comments about things you don’t understand or parts of the book that make you think, feel, or wonder. Try to identify themes and patterns. If you use the reading logs, much of this is already laid out for you.
· Bring the book and your notes to school every day for the first week of school. One day during the first week, you will write an in-class essay about your summer reading on a topic assigned by your English teacher. You should be able to understand character motivation (why they behave the way they do), identify and discuss major themes and have an awareness of literary elements (climax, theme, point-of-view, symbolism, imagery/figurative language, etc.) .You will need your notes and the book in order to write the essay. You may also have a creative project that you will do.
Enjoy. No really, I’m not being sarcastic (sort of). This can be enjoyable in a brainy sort of way.
I look forward to seeing you in September. Enjoy your summer!
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America
by Firoozeh Dumas (non-fiction)
In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here. More family soon followed, and the clan has been here ever since. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’s wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer who first sought riches on Bowling for Dollars and in Las Vegas, and later lost his job during the Iranian revolution; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English (nor cared to); her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an army of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and who encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman, becoming part of a one-couple melting pot.
The Book Thief by Markus Zu (fiction)
(Do not substitute the movie for the book. There is much left out that you will need to know and you don’t want to get caught stranded without information!)