Upper School Summer Reading

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier. A classic odyssey set during the American Civil War, as a wounded Confederate soldier tries to return to his sweetheart in the high country of western North Carolina. ISBN#: 0802142842

Into Thin Air
by Jon Krakauer. The author of Into the Wild tells another riveting tale, this time about a mountain-climbing disaster on Mt. Everest in 1996. ISBN#: 0385492081

 

The Fellowship of the Ring
by J.R.R. Tolkien. The 3-volume epic of Middle Earth is Tolkien’s version of an unlikely hero who overcomes impossible odds to find and destroy the Ring of Power. You may read 1, 2, or all 3 volumes. ISBN#: 0345339703

 

The Illiad
by Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Homer’s prequel to The Odyssey, the story of the Trojan War, is the first and last word on men and warfare. ISBN#: 0199536791

The Whale Rider
by Witi Ihimaera. The story of a young Maori girl, Kahu, and her relationship with her great-grandfather. When signs and portents indicate that Kahu has inherited special powers from the legendary "whale rider," she struggles to overcome her grandfather's prejudice against girls as tribal leaders. ISBN#: 0152050167

Watership Down
by Richard Adams. This charming tale of an intrepid band of wild rabbits on a quest for a new home has surprising complexity and many allusions to the classic hero’s journey. ISBN#: 0380002930

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens—It is set among the marshes of Kent and in London in the early to mid-1800s. From the outset, the reader is "treated" by the terrifying encounter between Pip, the protagonist, and the escaped convict, Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is a graphic book, full of extreme imagery, poverty, prison ships, "the hulks," barriers and chains, and fights to the death. It therefore combines intrigue and unexpected twists of autobiographical detail in different tones. Regardless of its narrative technique, the novel reflects the events of the time, Dickens' concerns, and the relationship between society and man.

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte-Charlotte Bronte's most beloved novel describes the passionate love between the courageous orphan Jane Eyre and the brilliant, brooding, and domineering Rochester. The loneliness and cruelty of Jane's childhood strengthen her natural independence and spirit, which prove invaluable when she takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. But after she falls in love with her sardonic employer, her discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a heart-wrenching choice. Ever since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving and unforgettable portrayal of a woman's quest for self-respect.
 

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene—Scobie, a police officer in a West African English colony during WW II, is morally above suspicion. Then, passed over for promotion, he is forced to borrow money from a Syrian trader/merchant to send his faded wife Louise on holiday in South Africa. In her absence, a German submarine torpedoes a ship, and when the survivors come ashore, Scobie falls in love with a sad young widow. Inexorably, his conscience and his love of God lead him to disaster.

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
Retold by Joseph Bedier. Translated by Hilaire Belloc (Vintage). A tragic tale of doomed romance between one of King Mark's greatest knights and his lady love. This story neatly parallels the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle. ISBN: 0-679-75016-9

Turn of the Screw
Henry James—The greatest ghost story ever written, in its slow build-up of tension, this short novel will make you forget Spielberg and redefine angst and horror. A governess in a remote English estate learns that the two children in her care are possessed—or are they? The outcome proves catastrophic.

Volpone
Ben Jonson-Jonson was a contemporary of Shakespeare and wrote satiric plays. Volpone is a Venetian gentleman who pretends to be on his deathbed, after a long illness, in order to dupe Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, three men who aspire to inherit his fortune. In their turns, each man arrives to Volpone’s house bearing a luxurious gift, intent upon having his name inscribed to the will of Volpone, as his heir. Mosca, Volpone’s parasite servant, encourages each man, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, to believe that he has been named heir to Volpone’s fortune; in the course of which, Mosca persuades Corbaccio to disinherit his own son in favour of Volpone. It goes from there, with many complications.

Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte-This is an English Romantic novel that tells the story of a savage, tormented foundling, Heathcliff, who falls madly in love with Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of his benefactor, and of the violence and misery that result from their thwarted longing for each other.

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry. Simon & Schuester Classic Edition. ISBN# 978-0684871226. Pulitzer Prize winning novel about retired Texas rangers in the late nineteenth-century who drive cattle to Montana for one last hurrah.
 

Native Son

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight. Belknap Press of Harvard University. ISBN# 978-0674008199. For the history buff, Blight’s impeccably researched work argues that almost all the dominant views of the Civil War and its aftermath, including Reconstruction and "reunion," prevalent in this country until the coming of the civil rights movement, were the direct result of an extensive Southern propaganda war, the remnants of which are still flourishing in various racist subculture.
 

The Grapes of Wrath

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

Lonesome Dove

by Larry McMurtry. Simon & Schuester Classic Edition. ISBN# 978-0684871226. Pulitzer Prize winning novel about retired Texas rangers in the late nineteenth-century who drive cattle to Montana for one last hurrah.
 

Native Son

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight. Belknap Press of Harvard University. ISBN# 978-0674008199. For the history buff, Blight’s impeccably researched work argues that almost all the dominant views of the Civil War and its aftermath, including Reconstruction and "reunion," prevalent in this country until the coming of the civil rights movement, were the direct result of an extensive Southern propaganda war, the remnants of which are still flourishing in various racist subculture.
 

The Grapes of Wrath

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

A Passage to India

by E.M.Forster. Penguin Classics. ISBN#: 014144116X. A young British woman, Adela Quested, intends to find the “real India” on her journey there at the peak of the British colonial period.
 

A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead. ISBN#: 159448385X. As a sequel to the largely masculine issues of The Kite Runner, Hosseini now turns his attention to the lives of Afghan women under the rule of the Taliban.

Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
by Fatima Mernissi. Basic Books. ISBN#: 0201489376. “’I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, Morocco. . .’ So begins the author in this rich narrative of a childhood behind the iron gates of a domestic harem.” (Amazon)

 

Palace Walk
by Naguib Mahfouz. Anchor Books. ISBN#: 0-385-26466-6. First in a trilogy by this Nobel Prize winner, a family saga set in early 20th century Cairo.

 

 

 

 

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
by Marjane Satrapi. Pantheon. ISBN#: 037571457X. “In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, the author tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime and the triumph of the Islamic Revolution.” (book jacket)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi. Random House Trade Paperbacks. ISBN#: 0812979303. “In 1995, after resigning from her job as a university professor due to repressive polices, the author invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret. . . .For two years they met to talk, share, and ‘shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color.’”(Amazon)

 

 

 

Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison. Vintage. ISBN#: 0-452-26011-6. The story of Milkman Dead, a disaffected young black man in 1960’s Detroit who finds happiness and redemption where it is least expected.

 

 

 

 

The Makioka Sisters
by Junichiro Tanizaki. Vintage. ISBN#: 0679761640. Set in the most traditional of Japanese cities, Osaka, in the years leading up to World War II, the story of three daughters of a fading aristocratic family. “If epic literature is based in the dramatic and forward-moving narrative of a male hero’s journey, The Makioka Sisters is a female epic of inaction. . . .the sisters are like heroes setting out for the new world. They’re like Odysseus, except without the ship and without the sea.” (Emily White on Amazon)

 

 

 

True History of the Kelly Gang
by Peter Carey. Vintage International. ISBN#: 0-375-72467-2. The real-life Robin Hood of Australia, Ned Kelly, speaks for himself in Carey’s imaginative recreation of the classic outlaw tale.

 

Extra Credit

Just Mercy, Adapted for Young Adults

by Bryan Stevenson.  Stevenson is a lawyer and social justice activist who writes about mass incarceration in America through the lens of those wrongfully imprisoned and his efforts to free them through the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that he founded.  (ISBN# 978-0-593-17704-4)

1491
by Charles Mann, ISBN-10: 1400032059
A fresh new view of what the Americas were like before the arrival of European explorers: “a far more urban, more populated, and technologically advanced region than generally assumed; and the Indians. . .had radcially engineered the landscape across the continents, to the point that even ‘timeless’ natural features like the Amazon rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention.” (Amazon.com Review)

A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway, ISBN-10: 068482499X

“Paris in the '20s! Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, lived happily on $5 a day and still had money for drinks at the Closerie des Lilas, skiing in the Alps, and fishing trips to Spain. On every corner and at every café table, there were the most extraordinary people living wonderful lives and telling fantastic stories.
 

Basin and Range
by John McPhee ISBN-10: 9780374516901

The first of John McPhee’s works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history of vanished landscapes, enhanced by the histories of people who bring them to light. The title refers to the physiographic province of the United States that reaches from eastern Utah to eastern California, a silent world of austere beauty, of hundreds of discrete high mountain ranges that are green with junipers and often white with snow. The terrain becomes the setting for a lyrical evocation of the science of geology, with important digressions into the plate-tectonics revolution and the history of the geologic time scale.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
by Wallace Stegner ISBN # 9780140159943

In this book, Wallace Stegner recounts the sucesses and frustrations of John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the American Southwest. A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West and spent a good deal of his life overcoming Washington politics in getting his message across. Only now, we may recognize just how accurate a prophet he was. (Amazon.com)

Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk
by Sir Thomas Browne, ISBN-10: 0882950177

Published in 1658, this book’s nominal subject was the discovery of a Roman urn burial site in Norfolk. The discovery of these remains prompts Browne to meditate on man's struggles with mortality. It is a piece of exquisite baroque prose that George Saintsbury called "the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world.”

Stop-Time
by Frank Conroy, ISBN #0140044469

Frank Conroy’s autobiography Stop-Time (1967) has an epigraph from a Wallace Stevens poem that begins “It is the human that is the alien,/The human that has no cousin in the moon.” The quote introduces the idea of alienation in Frank’s story: his feeling, as he was growing up in 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s America, that he didn’t fit in anywhere and was alone in a strange, indifferent universe. The autobiography as whole can be seen as Frank’s slow, painful movement toward overcoming this feeling of loneliness and “apartness” and achieving instead independence, confidence, and self-fulfillment. The title refers to moments of great significance in which time seems to stand still and impart a powerful imprint on Frank, although the meaning of these “stop-times” are often very hard to pin down. Since time in this book is seen as shifting and fluid, not an orderly series of ticking seconds, you’ll want to make a list of the important events in Frank’s life, arranged in chronological order with page numbers.

The Autobiography of Malcom X
by Malcom X ISBN-10: 0141185430

From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos, Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman, he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, the oppressed American blacks, he brought hope and self-respect. This autobiography (written with Alex Haley) reveals his quick-witted integrity, usually obscured by batteries of frenzied headlines, and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.

The Boys of Summer
by Roger Kahn, ISBN-10: 9780060883966

An account of “the legendary mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. It is the rare sports book that is composed of equal parts journalism, memoir, social history, and poetry.” (Amazon.com Review)

 

The Lives of a Cell
by Lewis Thomas ISBN-10: 0140047433

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."