Upper School Summer Reading
Summer Reading Introduction
Purpose of Summer Reading
Summer is the perfect time to spend some pleasurable hours with a good book, and so all students, grades 9-12, are asked to read one book from the list at their grade level. A list of books recommended for further summer reading is also provided in each grade level list. Students may receive extra credit for reading one or more of these additional books. Please purchase the correct edition by following the ISBN numbers listed.
Reading Level and Ability
This list of books has been compiled with an eye toward variety of subject matter, accessibility to all reading levels, and issues such as gender differences. The books are available at local bookstores and by clicking on the picture of the book on the Pace website. At the time this list was prepared, all of the titles were in print and available in paperback.
Reading Guides & Evaluation
All students must purchase the required book for their grade level, read it over the summer, and bring the book to school on the first day in August. The English teachers have provided reading guides in the form of inquiries. They’re designed to help you begin to think about some of the complex ideas in the summer reading books. We recommend that you write responses for two reasons: first, processing thoughts on paper that you pick up while reading helps you to get involved and to stay involved in the book; and second, thinking of ideas and writing them down helps them stick in your mind. These notes will not be graded, but writing responses will help you contribute to the class discussions and also help when you take the summer reading test.
Students will be asked to sign the honor pledge that they have read the book, and then the assignment will be assessed in different ways, depending on grade level. For most students, the summer reading assessment will count as the first quiz grade of fall semester. For more details about the summer reading books, the notes on the reading guides, and the extra credit opportunity, visit the Pace Academy website and follow the links to summer reading for the appropriate grade level.
Bailey Player
English Department Chairperson
bailey.player@paceacademy.org
Summer Reading Assignments
- 9th Grade CP & 9th Grade Honors
- 10th Grade CP & 10th Grade Honors
- 11th Grade CP American Literature & 11th Grade AP Literature and Composition
- 11th Grade Honors
- 12th Grade CP & Honors World Literature
- 12th Grade AP Language & Composition
9th Grade CP & 9th Grade Honors
The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (ISBN # 978-0-06-249853-3).
A 2017 National Book Award longlist selection, The Hate U Give tells the story of a 16-year-old Black girl who attends a suburban prep school and witnesses the shooting of her unarmed childhood friend by the police. The book raises many of the issues in the national discussion today, and reading it will better prepare our students to participate thoughtfully in that conversation. A reading guide prepared by the Pace Academy English department accompanies the book.
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit by reading one or more books from this list. You may receive 1/4 point for every 100 pages read, up to a total of one point (for 400 pages) added to your fall semester average in English. You will be writing an essay of about four typed pages for the 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
10th Grade CP & 10th Grade Honors
This summer we will read Matrix by Lauren Groff (ISBN: 978-1785151910). "Seventeen-year-old Marie, too wild for courtly life, is thrown to the dogs one winter morning, expelled from the royal court to become the prioress of an abbey. Marie is strange - tall, a giantess, her elbows and knees stick out, ungainly.
At first taken aback by life at the abbey, Marie finds purpose and passion among her mercurial sisters. Yet she deeply misses her secret lover Cecily and queen Eleanor.
Born last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, women who flew across the countryside with their sword fighting and dagger work, Marie decides to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. She will bring herself, and her sisters, out of the darkness, into riches and power.
MATRIX is a bold vision of female love, devotion and desire from one of the most adventurous writers at work today."
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit by reading one or more books from this list. The extra credit is ¼ point per 100 pages that you read, up to one point (for 400 pages) added to your fall semester average in English. You will be writing an essay of about 4 typed pages for the 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.
11th Grade CP American Literature & 11th Grade AP Literature and Composition
For your first assignment in American Literature, please read the Mariner Edition of Life of Pi, ISBN 978-01560-27328. The guide below is meant to be a supplement to your reading and should not be viewed as a substitute for your own close analysis of the novel. Completing the reading guide will give you a useful preparation tool when you are contributing to class discussions and then studying for the summer reading test.
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit by reading one or more books from this list. The extra credit is ¼ point per 100 pages that you read, up to one point (for 400 pages) added to your fall semester average in English before the final exam. You will then write a response journal of at least 500 words for the 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
by Richard Wright. Perennial Classics. ISBN# 978-0060837563. Gripping 1940 novel about a young African-American man who murders a white woman in 1930s Chicago and the harrowing events that follow.
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
by John Steinbeck. Penguin Classics. ISBN #978-0143039433. Pulitzer Prize winning tale of the Great Depression which chronicles the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships as migrant farm workers.
11th Grade Honors
Your first assignment is to read and mark (underline, highlight, and/or annotate) Nicola Yoon’s novel, The Sun is Also a Star (ISBN 978-0-553-49668-0) before the first day of class in August.
Like all great novels, this one begins to answer the question of what it means to be human.
Yoon employs two narrators: Natasha, a Jamaican-American teenage girl who trusts the measurements of math and the safety of science, and Daniel, a Korean-American teenage boy who wrestles with obeying his first-generation immigrant parents’ strict demands and his inner voice to be a poet. Yoon punctuates these chapters with illuminating asides on other characters and concepts that help shed light on the developing relationship between Natasha and Daniel.
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit by reading one or more books from this list. The extra credit is ¼ point per 100 pages that you read, up to one point (for 400 pages) added to your fall semester average in English before the final exam. You will then write a response journal of at least 500 words for the 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
by Richard Wright. Perennial Classics. ISBN# 978-0060837563. Gripping 1940 novel about a young African-American man who murders a white woman in 1930s Chicago and the harrowing events that follow.
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
by John Steinbeck. Penguin Classics. ISBN #978-0143039433. Pulitzer Prize winning tale of the Great Depression which chronicles the migration of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl family to California and their subsequent hardships as migrant farm workers.
12th Grade CP & Honors World Literature
Our summer reading is Andy Weir’s science fiction novel, The Martian. This text will kick off our studies about literature and film this year. After you finish reading, please watch Ridley Scott’s film version, starring Matt Damon.
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit for reading additional books this summer, up to ¼ point per 100 pages read. For the extra credit, you’ll write about the book, following a standard book report format: plot summary, analysis of the main characters and the way they change, themes, and your personal reaction. You may earn 1 point of extra credit (for 400 pages of reading) which would be added to your semester average before the final exam.
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.
Daughter of Fortune
by Isabel Allende. Harper Collins. ISBN#: 0060932759. The picaresque story of Eliza Sommers, the adopted daughter of wealthy grandees in 19th century Chile, her secret love affair, and harrowing adventures in the gold rush era of California.
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.
12th Grade AP Language & Composition
About the Book: A wide variety of extremist groups -- Islamic fundamentalists, neo-Nazis -- share the oddly similar belief that a tiny shadowy elite rule the world from a secret room. In Them, journalist Jon Ronson has joined the extremists to track down the fabled secret room.
As a journalist and a Jew, Ronson was often considered one of "Them," but he had no idea if their meetings actually took place. Was he just not invited? Them takes us across three continents and into the secret room. Along the way he meets Omar Bakri Mohammed, considered one of the most dangerous men in Great Britain, PR-savvy Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Thom Robb, and the survivors of Ruby Ridge. He is chased by men in dark glasses and unmasked as a Jew in the middle of a Jihad training camp. In the forests of northern California he even witnesses CEOs and leading politicians -- like Dick Cheney and George Bush -- undertake a bizarre owl ritual.
Ronson's investigations, by turns creepy and comical, reveal some alarming things about the looking-glass world of "us" and "them." Them is a deep and fascinating look at the lives and minds of extremists. Are the extremists onto something? Or is Jon Ronson becoming one of them?
Reading Assignment
Parallel Reading
Extra Credit
You may earn extra credit by reading one or more books from this list. You may receive 1/4 point for every 100 pages read, up to a total of one point (for 400 pages) added to your fall semester average in English. You will be writing an essay of about 4 typed pages in order to earn the 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."