AP ENGLISH LITERATURE AND COMPOSITION

Summer Reading 2010

You MUST read Jane Eyre and The Grapes of Wrath plus 2 of the following books. All of the books on this list have appeared at least once on previous AP English Literature and Composition exams, so you should read your choices very carefully. It would be a good idea to make notes as you read. These notes will be useful during the final preparation for the AP test in the spring of 2011
 

• Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) Full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a mad wife conveniently stashed away in the attic, the novel tells the story of Jane and her doomed relationship with Rochester.
   
• Oedipus the King (Sophocles) A man kills his father and sets terrible events into motion. His final discovery is shocking.
   
• The End of the Affair (Graham Greene) The love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah, flourishing in the turbulent times of the London Blitz, ends when she suddenly and without explanation breaks it off. Two years later, after a chance meeting, Bendrix hires a private detective to follow Sarah, and slowly his love for her turns into an obsession.
   
• Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte). Set in the wild and windy moors of northern Yorkshire. Lockwood relates the stories of Heathcliff and Catherine, and Cathy, Linton, and Hareton...a love affair continues through generations of these English families.
   
• Atonement (Ian McEwan) We meet 13-year-old Briony Tallis in the summer of 1935, as she attempts to stage a production of her new drama "The Trials of Arabella" to welcome home her older, idolized brother Leon. But things quickly turn bizarrely catastrophic thanks to the highly imaginative but utterly naive and histrionic Briony, who sees something sinister occur between her sister Cecilia and Robbie, the handyman, and wildly overreacts. McEwan's instantly addictive story line is of the bad-to-worse variety as he moves on to the harrowing vicissitudes of World War II. (Note: contains some graphic content)
   
• Catch 22 (Joseph Heller) A novel that seemingly captures the madness of wartime but what Heller really catches is the moral dilemma of an individual caught up in the mob hysteria of war, where the rules of civilization and laws are temporarily and deliberately suspended by the authorities. Very funny and very sad all at once. (Note: contains some graphic content).
   
• The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a nearly hopeless situation, partly because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, they set out for California along with thousands of other "Okies" in search of land, jobs and dignity.