Summer Reading Assignment for Students Entering World Experience
Summer 2018
Since literature provides a window to the past, you’ll choose two books to read over the summer before you walk into the World Experience classroom next year. Research your selections carefully to be sure that you are choosing quality works of literature as well as books that you will enjoy reading. Use the questions listed below to help you evaluate the books you are considering, and be prepared to defend your choices in the fall. Basic information about the author can usually be found on the back inside flap of the book jacket, or you can look for more detail by researching the authors and their works online.
- Have the authors you’ve chosen won awards for their work?
- How many books have they published?
- Are their books bestsellers? Which periodicals have published their work?
- Are they college professors? If so, where do they teach?
- How many books have they written?
As you read, think about the following:
- How does each book change, challenge or confirm your thinking about the events, people and places in your book? From each book, either bring a passage or select 5-7 quotations you could use to address this question in class. We will be working with this the first week of school.
Book # 1– Fiction: Read a modern novel (written after 1950) with justifiable literary merit. Go to the library or bookstore and explore! World Experience is a world literature course, so you may choose a work from any region, or a work in translation, as long as it was written after 1950. Suggestions for Fiction: In the Time of the Butterflies, Life of Pi, The Joy Luck Club, The Orphan Master’s Son, The Fishermen, Memoirs of a Geisha, Shanghai Girls, When the Emperor was Divine, Moloka’i, The Namesake, My Name is Asher Lev
Book # 2—Non-fiction: Read a work of nonfiction (memoir, auto-biography, biography, literary non-fiction) about people from a place and/or time different from your own. For example, this book might be a third-person account of a historical event, an autobiography of a historical figure, or a memoir about living in a place outside of the United States.
Suggestions for Non-fiction: King Leopold’s Ghost, Dead Wake, The Great Influenza, I Am Malala, The History of the World in Six Glasses, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World, In the Garden of Beasts, An Edible History of Humanity, Isaac’s Storm
Recommended: Once you’ve completed the first two tasks on this list, feel free to peruse the lists of recommended summer reading for the other English classes to find additional books you would enjoy reading this summer.