Why Do You Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test?

AP READING LIST

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A lot of students wonder if there’s a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Composition exam. While there’s not an official College-Board AP reading list, there are books that will be more useful for you to read than others as you prepare for the exam.In this article, I’ll break down why you need to read books to prepare, how many you should plan on reading, and what you should read—including poetry.

Why Do You Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test?

This might seem like kind of an obvious question—you need to read books because it’s a literature exam! But actually, there are three specific reasons why you need to read novels, poems, and plays in preparation for the AP Lit Test.

To Increase Your Familiarity With Different Eras and Genres of Literature

Reading a diverse array of novels, poetry and plays from different eras and genres will help you be familiar with the language that appears in the various passages on the AP Lit exam’s multiple choice and essay sections. If you read primarily modern works, for example, you may stumble through analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet. So, having a basic familiarity level with the language of a broad variety of literary works will help keep you from floundering in confusion on test day because you’re seeing a work unlike anything you’ve ever read.

To Improve Your Close-Reading Skills

You’ll also want to read to improve your close-reading and rhetorical analysis skills. When you do read, really engage with the text: think about what the author’s doing to construct the novel/poem/play/etc., what literary techniques and motifs are being deployed, and what major themes are at play. You don’t necessarily need to drill down to the same degree on every text, but you should always be thinking, “Why did the author write this piece this way?”

For the Student Choice Free-Response Question

Perhaps the most critical piece in reading to prepare for the AP Lit test, however, is for the student choice free-response question. For the third question on the second exam section, you’ll be asked to examine how a specific theme works in one novel or play that you choose. The College Board does provide an example list of works, but you can choose any workyou like just so long as it has adequate “literary merit.” However, you need to be closely familiar with more than one work so that you can be prepared for whatever theme the College Board throws at you!

How Many Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam?

That depends. In terms of reading to increase your familiarity with literature from different eras and genres and to improve your close-reading skills, the more books you have time to read, the better. You’ll want to read them all with an eye for comprehension and basic analysis, but you don’t necessarily need to focus equally on every book you read.

For the purposes of the student choice question, however, you’ll want to read books more closely, so that you could write a detailed, convincing analytical essay about any of their themes. So you should know the plot, characters, themes, and major literary devices or motifs used inside and out.Since you won’t know what theme you’ll be asked to write about in advance, you’ll need to be prepared to write a student choice question on more than just one book.

Of the books you read for prep both in and out of class, choose four to fivebooks that are thematically diverse to learn especially well in preparation for the exam. You may want to read these more than once, and you certainly want to take detailed notes on everything that’s going on in those books to help you remember key points and themes. Discussing them with a friend or mentor who has also read the book will help you generate ideas on what’s most interesting or intriguing about the work and how its themes operate in the text.

You may be doing some of these activities anyways for books you are assigned to read for class, and those books might be solid choices if you want to be as efficient as possible.Books you write essays about for school are also great choices to include in your four to fivebook stable since you will be becoming super-familiar with them for the writing you do in class anyways.

In answer to the question, then, of how many books you need to read for the AP Lit exam: you need to know four to five inside and out, and beyond that, the more the better!

What Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam?

The most important thing for the student choice free-response question is that the work you select needs to have “literary merit.” What does this mean? In the context of the College Board, this means you should stick with works of literary fiction. So in general, avoid mysteries, fantasies, romance novels, and so on.

If you’re looking for ideas, authors and works that have won prestigious prizes like the Pulitzer, Man Booker, the National Book Award, and so on are good choices. Anything you read specifically for your AP literature class is a good choice, too.If you aren’t sure if a particular work has the kind of literary merit the College Board is looking for, ask your AP teacher.

When creating your own AP Literature reading listfor the student choice free-response, try to pick works that are diverse in author, setting, genre, and theme. This will maximize your ability to comprehensively answer a student choice question about pretty much anything with one of the works you’ve focused on.

So, I might, for example, choose:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare, play, 1605
• Major themes and devices: magic, dreams, transformation, foolishness, man vs. woman, play-within-a-play
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, novel, 1847
• Major themes and devices: destructive love, exile, social and economic class, suffering and passion, vengeance and violence, unreliable narrator, frame narrative, family dysfunction, intergenerational narratives.
• The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, novel, 1920
• Major themes and devices: Tradition and duty, personal freedom, hypocrisy, irony, social class, family, “maintaining appearances”, honor
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966
• Major themes and devices: slavery, race, magic, madness, wildness, civilization vs. chaos, imperialism, gender

As you can see, while there is some thematic overlap in my chosen works, they also cover a broad swathe of themes. They are also all very different in style (although you’ll just have to take my word on that one unless you go look at all of them yourself), and they spana range of time periods and genres as well.

However, while there’s not necessarily a specific, mandated AP Literature reading list, there are books that come up again and again on the suggestion lists for student choice free-response questions. When a book comes up over and over again on exams, this suggests both that it’s thematically rich, so you can use it to answer lots of different kinds of questions, and that the College Board sees a lot of value in the work.

To that end, I’ve assembled a list, separated by time period, of all the books that have appeared on the suggested works list for student choice free-response questions at least twice since 2003.While you certainly shouldn’t be aiming to read all of these books (there’s way too many for that!), these are all solid choices for the student choice essay. Other books by authors from this list are also going to be strong choices. It’s likely that some of your class reading will overlap with this list, too.

I’ve divided up the works into chunks by time period. In addition to title, each entry includes the author, whether the work is a novel, play, or something else, and when it was first published or performed. Works are alphabetical by author.

PLEASE HIGHLIGHT THE PIECES OF LITERATURE THAT YOU HAVE READ

Ancient Works

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Medea / Euripides / play / 431 BC
The Odyssey / Homer / epic poem / (no date)
Antigone / Sophocles / play / 441 BC
Oedipus Rex / Sophocles / play / 429 BC

1500-1799

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes / novel / 1605
Tom Jones / Henry Fielding / novel / 1749
As You Like It / Shakespeare / play / 1623
Julius Caesar / Shakespeare / play / 1599
King Lear / Shakespeare / play / 1606
A Midsummer Night’s Dream / Shakespeare / play / 1605
The Merchant of Venice / Shakespeare / play / 1605
Othello / Shakespeare / play / 1604
The Tempest / Shakespeare / play / 1611
Candide / Voltaire / novel / 1759

1800-1899

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Emma / Jane Austen / novel / 1815
Mansfield Park / Jane Austen / novel / 1814
Pride and Prejudice / Jane Austen / novel / 1813
Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte / novel / 1847
Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte / novel / 1847
The Awakening / Kate Chopin / novel / 1899
The Red Badge of Courage / Stephen Crane / novel / 1895
Bleak House / Charles Dickens / novel / 1853
David Copperfield / Charles Dickens / novel / 1850
Great Expectations / Charles Dickens / novel / 1861
Oliver Twist / Charles Dickens / novel / 1837
A Tale of Two Cities / Charles Dickens / novel / 1859
Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoyevsky / novel / 1866
Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert / novel / 1856
Jude the Obscure / Thomas Hardy / novel / 1895
The Mayor of Casterbridge / Thomas Hardy / novel / 1886
Tess of the d’Urbervilles / Thomas Hardy / novel / 1891
The Scarlet Letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne / novel / 1850
A Doll’s House / Henrik Ibsen / play / 1879
The American / Henry James / novel / 1877
The Portrait of a Lady / Henry James / novel / 1881
Moby-Dick / Herman Melville / novel / 1851
Frankenstein / Mary Shelley / novel / 1818
Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy / novel / 1877
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain / novel / 1885

1900-1939

Title / Author / Genre / Date
My Ántonia / Willa Cather / novel / 1918
The Cherry Orchard / Anton Chekhov / play / 1904
Heart of Darkness / Joseph Conrad / novel / 1902
Sister Carrie / Theodore Dreiser / novel / 1900
Murder in the Cathedral / T.S. Eliot / play / 1935
Absalom, Absalom! / William Faulkner / novel / 1936
As I Lay Dying / William Faulkner / novel / 1930
Light in August / William Faulkner / novel / 1932
The Sound and the Fury / William Faulkner / novel / 1929
The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald / novel / 1925
A Passage to India / E.M. Forster / novel / 1924
The Little Foxes / Lillian Hellman / play / 1939
Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zora Neale Hurston / novel / 1937
Brave New World / Aldous Huxley / novel / 1931
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / James Joyce / novel / 1916
Billy Budd / Herman Melville / novel / 1924
Major Barbara / George Bernard Shaw / play / 1905
The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck / novel / 1939
The Age of Innocence / Edith Wharton / novel / 1920
Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton / novel / 1911
The House of Mirth / Edith Wharton / novel / 1905
Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf / novel / 1925

1940-1969

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe / novel / 1958
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? / Edward Albee / play / 1962
Another Country / James Baldwin / novel / 1962
Waiting for Godot / Samuel Beckett / play / 1953
The Plague / Albert Camus / novel / 1947
Invisible Man / Ralph Ellison / novel / 1952
Lord of the Flies / William Golding / novel / 1954
A Raisin in the Sun / Lorraine Hansberry / play / 1959
Catch-22 / Joseph Heller / novel / 1961
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ s Nest / Ken Kesey / novel / 1962
A Separate Peace / John Knowles / novel / 1959
To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee / novel / 1960
The Crucible / Arthur Miller / play / 1953
Death of a Salesman / Arthur Miller / play / 1949
House Made of Dawn / N. Scott Momaday / novel / 1968
Wise Blood / Flannery O’Connor / novel / 1952
1984 / George Orwell / novel / 1949
Cry, the Beloved Country / Alan Paton / novel / 1948
All the King’s Men / Robert Penn Warren / novel / 1946
The Chosen / Chaim Potok / novel / 1967
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys / novel / 1966
The Catcher in the Rye / JD Salinger / novel / 1951
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead / Tom Stoppard / play / 1966
Cat’s Cradle / Kurt Vonnegut / novel / 1963
The Glass Menagerie / Tennessee Williams / play / 1945
A Streetcar Named Desire / Tennessee Williams / play / 1947
Black Boy / Richard Wright / memoir / 1945
Native Son / Richard Wright / novel / 1940

1970-1989

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Bless Me, Ultima / Rudolfo Anaya / novel / 1972
The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros / novel / 1984
“Master Harold” . . . and the boys / Athol Fugard / play / 1982
M. Butterfly / David Henry Hwang / play / 1988
A Prayer for Owen Meany / John Irving / novel / 1989
The Woman Warrior / Maxine Hong Kingston / memoir / 1976
Obasan / Joy Kogawa / novel / 1981
Beloved / Toni Morrison / novel / 1987
The Bluest Eye / Toni Morrison / novel / 1970
Song of Solomon / Toni Morrison / novel / 1977
Sula / Toni Morrison / novel / 1973
Jasmine / Bharati Mukherjee / novel / 1989
The Women of Brewster Place / Gloria Naylor / novel / 1982
Going After Cacciato / Tim O’Brien / novel / 1978
Equus / Peter Shaffer / play / 1973
Ceremony / Leslie Marmon Silko / novel / 1977
Sophie’s Choice / William Styron / novel / 1979
The Color Purple / Alice Walker / novel / 1982
Fences / August Wilson / play / 1983
The Piano Lesson / August Wilson / play / 1987

1990-Present

Title / Author / Genre / Date
Reservation Blues / Sherman Alexie / novel / 1995
The Blind Assassin / Margaret Atwood / novel / 2000
Oryx and Crake / Margaret Atwood / novel / 2003
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter / Kim Edwards / novel / 2005
Cold Mountain / Charles Frazier / novel / 1997
Snow Falling on Cedars / David Guterson / novel / 1994
The Kite Runner / Khaled Hosseini / novel / 2003
A Thousand Splendid Suns / Khaled Hosseini / novel / 2007
Never Let Me Go / Kazuo Ishiguro / novel / 2005
The Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver / novel / 1998
The Namesake / JumpaLahiri / novel / 2004
All the Pretty Horses / Cormac McCarthy / novel / 1992
Atonement / Ian McEwan / novel / 2001
Native Speaker / Chang Rae-Lee / novel / 1995
The God of Small Things / Arundhati Roy / novel / 1997
A Thousand Acres / Jane Smiley / novel / 1991
The Bonesetter’s Daughter / Amy Tan / novel / 2001
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle / David Wroblewski / novel / 2008

An Addendum on Poetry

You probably won’t be writing about poetry on your student choice essay—most just aren’t meaty enough in terms of action and character to merit a full-length essay on the themes when you don’t actually have the poem in front of you (a major exception being The Odyssey). That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be reading poetry, though! You should be reading a wide variety of poets from different eras to get comfortable with all the varieties of poetic language. This will make the poetry analysis essay and the multiple-choice questions about poetry much easier!I’ve placed an asterisk next to the most notable and important poets in the list; you should aim to read one or two poems by each of the starred poets to get familiar with a broad range of poetic styles and eras.

14th-17th Centuries

1. Anne Bradstreet
2. Geoffrey Chaucer
3. John Donne
4. George Herbert
5. Ben Jonson
6. Andrew Marvell
7. John Milton
8. William Shakespeare*

18th-19th Centuries

1. William Blake*
2. Robert Browning
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge*
4. Emily Dickinson*
5. Paul Laurence Dunbar
6. George Gordon, Lord Byron
7. Gerard Manley Hopkins
8. John Keats*
9. Edgar Allan Poe*
10. Alexander Pope*
11. Percy Bysshe Shelley*
12. Alfred, Lord Tennyson*
13. Walt Whitman*
14. William Wordsworth*

Early-Mid 20th Century

1. W. H. Auden
2. Elizabeth Bishop
3. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
4. T. S. Eliot*
5. Robert Frost*
6. Langston Hughes*
7. Philip Larkin
8. Robert Lowell
9. Marianne Moore
10. Sylvia Plath*
11. Anne Sexton*
12. Wallace Stevens
13. William Carlos Williams
14. William Butler Yeats*

Late 20th Century-Present

1. Edward Kamau Brathwaite
2. Gwendolyn Brooks
3. Lorna Dee Cervantes
4. Lucille Clifton
5. Billy Collins
6. Rita Dove
7. Joy Harjo
8. Seamus Heaney
9. Garrett Hongo
10. Adrienne Rich
11. Leslie Marmon Silko
12. Cathy Song
13. Derek Walcott
14. Richard Wilbur

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