Tenth Honors English Summer Reading List

I congratulate you on accepting the challenge of Tenth Grade Honors English. The sophomore year will introduce you to American Literature. Through the study of various literary forms, we will examine the changes in both writing and culture in America. As part of this program, I request you to read three books over the summer. Two of these books must come from the choices listed below, while the third book is your choice. I do however require that the book you choose be age appropriate. You can be purchase all of these at any of our local bookstores , Amazon Books or borrow from the library. I ask you to keep a readers journal for each of the texts. I would shoot for 4-6 pages per book. I do not want summary! I read the books. React as you read and look at themes. In September, I will be assigning an essay due the second week Upon your return to class in September, I will be administering a test of your reading to make sure that it was completed, as well as, to access your initial writing skills. Thank you and have a wonderful summer. If you have any additional questions regarding the selections, email me at belasco@lcmr.capemayschools.com.

Mr. Belasco

Please choose one (1) of the following novels

Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes were Watching God:

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston draws a sharp portrait of a proud, independent black woman looking for her own identity and resolving not to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or romantic dreams. Like most lives of black women of the early 20th century (or any time for that matter), Janie Crawford's life, told here in her own sure voice, is not without its frustrations, terrors, and tragedies — in fact, it is full of them. But the power of her story comes from her life-affirming attitude: Through all the changes she goes through — once divorced, twice widowed (once by her own gun-wielding hand)-she kept a death-grip commitment to live on her own terms, relying only on her own guts, creativity, strength, and passion, and the power she drew from her community, to pull her through. In Janie, Hurston created a character that reflected her own strong belief that the most important mission we have is to discover ourselves.

Janie Crawford was raised in the household of her grandmother, Nanny Crawford, a maid and a former slave. Janie, like her mother before her, was born of rape, and Nanny is committed to protecting her from the sexual and racial violence she and her daughter endured. She pushes Janie into marriage with an older man named Logan Killicks, a farmer with some property. Her life with Killicks is full of boredom and hard labor, so she runs off with Joe Starks, a handsome and well-off storekeeper who moves her to the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida. Even with the prestige and security this new marriage brings, she is bored and unfulfilled by her stunted life with Starks. When Starks dies, Janie begins to live with Tea Cake Woods, a man who cannot provide her with the stability that her Nanny taught her to value, but who finally gives her the passion and satisfaction she'd been looking for all along. Even when further tragedy greets her, she maintains a staunchly positive view of the future.

Hurston, an anthropologist and folklorist, fills this novel with shotgun rhythms and the poetic language of her native south. Language in this novel is crucial; it is through the beautiful self- made idiosyncrasies of southern speech and storytelling that Janie expresses her own will toward self-definition. Their Eyes Were Watching God has been called the first African American feminist novel because of its portrayal of a strong black woman rebelling against society's restrictions — and the received wisdom of her Nanny, no less — to seek out her own destiny. But ultimately, this is not a novel that looks out to the world to make political protest or social commentary; it concerns itself with describing the power that lies within us to define ourselves and our lives as we see fit, unbound and unfettered by society's limitations and prejudices. As Alice Walker once wrote, "There is enough self-love in that one book — love of community, culture, traditions — to restore a world."

Henry James Washington Square

Short novel by Henry James, published in 1880 and praised for its depiction of the complicated relationship between a stubborn father and his daughter. The novel's main character, Catherine Sloper, lives with her widowed aunt and her physician father in New York City's fashionable Washington Square district. A plain, rather stolid young woman, Catherine is a disappointment to her father. She is courted by Morris Townsend, who is interested only in her potential inheritance. When her father threatens to disinherit her if she marries the fortune hunter, Townsend abandons her. Many years later, after her father's death, Townsend reappears and attempts to renew his suit. Catherine rejects him and lives on as a confirmed spinster in her Washington Square house

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms

Novel by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1929. Like his early short stories and his novel The Sun Also Rises, the work is full of the disillusionment of the "lost generation" expatriates. While serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I, the American lieutenant Frederick Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley, who tends him after he is wounded. She becomes pregnant but refuses to marry him, and he returns to his post. Henry deserts during the Italians' retreat after the Battle of Caporetto, and the reunited couple flee into Switzerland. There, however, Catherine and her baby die during childbirth, leaving Henry desolate

Annie Proulx: Shipping News

Ingram
The winner of the 1993 National Book Award explores the darkly comic and sometimes magical portrait of a contemporary American family. By the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Postcards. Reprint. 75,000 first printing. Major ad/promo. Tour.

Simon & Schuster
E. Annie Proulx focuses on a Newfoundland fishing town in a tale about a third-rate newspaperman and the women in his life -- his elderly aunt and two young daughters -- who decide to resettle in their ancestral seaside home. The transformation each of the character undergoes following move is profound. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary American family, The Shipping News enlightens readers to the powers of E. Annie Proulx's storytelling genius and her expert evocation of time and place. She is truly one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.

THE SHIPPING NEWS:

Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Winner of the 1993 National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the Irish Times International Fiction Prize
Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award

Barbara Kingsolver Animal Dreams

From the acclaimed author of The Bean Trees and Homeland, comes a powerful story of love and courage in an exotc southwestern landscape. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American myths, this is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's greatest commitments

Please choose one non-fiction book from the following list

John McPhee The Pine Barrens

Contrary to popular opinion, the whole of New Jersey is not a continuous Superfund site enlivened solely by poorly labeled Turnpike exits and skanky diners. In fact, the largest essentially untouched wilderness east of the Mississippi comprises nearly half the state: the New Jersey Pine Barrens. This more than 1,000-square-mile region has only a few thousand inhabitants--the Pineys, whose way of life has remained essentially unchanged since the 17th century. McPhee--one of the finest American essayists of the 20th century--has written an extraordinarily compelling, informative, and insightful book about the botanical, cultural, hydrological, and historical peculiarities of this region. He also details the efforts to save it from the creeping urbanization of nearby Philadelphia and New York City. Very Highly Recommended.

Jon Krakauer Into the Wild
"God, he was a smart kid..." So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question that Jon Krakauer's book tries to answer. While it doesn't—cannot—answer the question with certainty, Into the Wild does shed considerable light along the way. Not only about McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. Krakauer quotes Wallace Stegner's writing on a young man who similarly disappeared in the Utah desert in the 1930s: "At 18, in a dream, he saw himself ... wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams." Into the Wild shows that McCandless, while extreme, was hardly unique; the author makes the hermit into one of us, something McCandless himself could never pull off. By book's end, McCandless isn't merely a newspaper clipping, but a sympathetic, oddly magnetic personality. Whether he was "a courageous idealist, or a reckless idiot," you won't soon forget Christopher McCandless.

Aldo Leopold The Sand County Almanac

“We can place this book on the shelf that holds the writings of Thoreau and John Muir." San Francisco Chronicle

These astonishing portraits of the natural world explore the breathtaking diversity of the unspoiled American landscape -- the mountains and the prairies, the deserts and the coastlines. A stunning tribute to our land and a bold challenge to protect the world we love.

Synopsis
"There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. These essays are the delights and dilemmas of one who cannot."--Aldo Leopold.

From the Publisher
A profoundly affecting work. I first read this in a college ecology class and it’s a book I return to again and again for mental and environmental grounding. Simple, beautiful, important and imperative.
Teri Henry, Director of Subsidiary Rights

Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

-- Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review

"The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. A reader's heart must go out to a young writer with a sense of wonder so fearless and unbridled...There is an ambition about her book that I like...It is the ambition to feel."

n From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Kirsten Backstrom
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a series of essays that combines scientific observation, philosophy, daily thoughts, and deeper introspection with glorious prose. On the surface, Annie Dillard is simply exploring a place called Tinker Creek and its inhabitants: "It's a good place to live; there's lots to think about." But as her observations range well beyond the landscape into worlds of esoteric fact and metaphysical insight, each paragraph becomes suffused with images and ideas. Whether she is quoting the Koran or Albert Einstein, describing the universe of an Eskimo shaman or the mating of luna moths, Annie Dillard offers up her own knowledge with reverence for her material and respect for her reader. She observes her surroundings faithfully, intimately, sharing what can be shared with anyone willing to wait and watch with her. In the end, however, "No matter how quiet we are, the muskrats stay hidden. Maybe they sense the tense hum of consciousness, the buzz from two human beings who in silence cannot help but be aware of each other, and so of themselves." The precision of individual words, the vitality of metaphor, the sheer profusion of sources, the vivid sensory and cerebral impressions - all combine to make Pilgrim at Tinker Creek something extravagant and extraordinary.

John Steinbeck: Travels with Charlie

As his books reveal, John Steinbeck is a writer who is happiest when he gets down to earth. He is a rugged, broad-shouldered, six-foot Californian, born in Salinas, and destined to write his first stories about the Valley. He has the gift of identifying himself passionately with other Americans, with migratory fruit pickers, as in his novel In Dubious Battle, and with the Okies, as in The Grapes of Wrath. He relishes doing things with his own two hands; in a swift self-portrait he writes, "I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment." Gradually his career drew him into the success and confinement of Manhattan and Long Island, and it came to him with a shock one day at the age of fifty-eight to realize that not for twenty years had he seen at close hand the country he had been writing about.

His new book, Travels with Charley (Viking, $4.95), is a one-man, one-dog account of the expedition in which he recaptures his familiarity with America. He set out with some misgiving, not sure his health would stand up to the 10,000-mile journey he envisioned; as he traveled, the years sloughed off him, and the eager, sensuous pages in which he writes about what he found and whom he encountered frame a picture of our human nature in the twentieth century which will not soon be surpassed.

For the trip Mr. Steinbeck wanted a three-quarter-ton truck, and on it a little house built like the cabin of a small boat. He tells in delightful detail of the cabin and of the viands and equipment with which it was stocked. "I had to go alone and I had to be self-contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back." For companionship he took with him Charley, a middle-aged French poodle, and Charley, as we come to know him, is one of the most civilized and attractive dogs in literature. They set off together in Rocinante, as the truck is called, in the early autumn, and they drove north through Connecticut and on to Deerfield, where the writer stopped to say good-bye to his teen-age son, one of "two hundred teen-age prisoners of education just settling down to serve their winter sentence." The boys of Eaglebrook came down to visit the truck, and "they looked courteous curses at me because I could go on and they could not." This was the effect that he and the little cabin were to have on hundreds of casual visitors. "Lord, I wish I could go with you!" was what they said or thought. And on he goes through the blazing foliage into Maine, pausing at Deer Isle, commenting on why he prefers climate to weather and wondering how a State-of-Mainer could ever find contentment in the sameness of Florida. Then, at our most northerly border, he turns west, and camping now on a knoll, now beside a trout brook, now in his man-made loneliness in the drumming rain, he and Charley find their way back to the understanding of this monster land.

This is a book to be read slowly for its savor, and one which, like Thoreau, will be quoted and measured by our own experience. It holds such happy passages as his love for Montana, his rediscovery of San Francisco, and his surprising new impressions of the Middle West; it holds such horror as he witnessed in the rancid race demonstrations in New Orleans. And as all good journeys must, this one suddenly went flat as he was returning through Virginia. Thereafter, his one desire was to get home, and when a policeman forbade him to drive through the Holland Tunnel with so much butane in the cabin, all the novelist could say was, "But I want to get home. How am I going to get home?" Incidentally, in his passage of over 10,000 miles through thirty-eight states, he was not recognized even once. A review by Edward Weeks

Choose one book of your own to read as well