Summer 2020
AP Literature
The 2020 AP Literature summer reading requirement is to choose one of the books from the list below to read and analyze. In addition, complete the following literary analysis assignments for your chosen text:
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Compose a 15 quote double-entry journal. Choose 15 meaningful quotes from the text that you
find thought provoking – record the quotes in column 1 of your double-entry journal. In the
second column, record your insightful inference about the text. Inferences should be a minimum
of three sentences. Quotes should, of course, come from throughout the novel (not 15 quotes from
1 chapter). This assignment can be typed or handwritten. - Create Sketch Notes for the novel as a whole. View Sketch Note Directions
Assignments are due the first day of school. You should also be prepared for a timed writing on your summer reading novel during the first week of school. Email Ms. Day at mday@bishopchatard.org with any questions. I look forward to having you in class!
* Descriptions are from Amazon.com
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine’s father. The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Few creatures of horror have seized readers’ imaginations and held them for so long as the anguished monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (published in 1818). The story of Victor Frankenstein’s terrible creation and the havoc it caused has enthralled generations of readers and inspired countless writers of horror and suspense. With Frankenstein, she succeeded admirably in the task she set for herself: to create a story that, in her own words, “would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror — one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.”
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
The Joy Luck Club tells the story of four mothers, four daughters, and four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s “saying” the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy play by William Shakespeare. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (mechanicals), who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set.