AP

Literature Summer Reading Assignment

Overview
Incoming AP Literature students are required to read over the summer in
preparation for the course and subsequent AP exam. One portion of the AP exam,
the Free Response essay, demands that students have a wide range of challenging
literary works on which they can draw when writing that essay. The goal of this
summers reading, however, is not to prepare you for the exam but to initiate you
into the conversation about ideas through books by both contemporary and classic
authors.
AP Literature is college literature; it not simply preparation for college. If you are
looking for ways around this reading assignment, you should not enroll in this class.
Students who do not complete the summer readingall of it, as spelled out by these
guidelineswill not be eligible to take the course.
If you have any questions, write to me at lcardinale@dallasisd.org.
Choose from one of the novels below and complete a dialectical journal:

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
Beowulf
Going After Cacciato by Tim OBrien
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros
The Waves by Virginia Woolf
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
Obasan by Joy Kagawa
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
The Fall by Albert Camus
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley


Dialectical Reader-Response Journal
As you read, keep a reading log in which you discuss the ideas in the selected work.
In this way you will begin to connect these ideas to your own experience. As you
reflect and question, listen carefully to your thoughts and attempt to describe the
effect the book is having on you. Write honestly, respond deeply, admit confusion,
expand on authors ideas, and attempt to discover your own.

Directions 1. Divide your paper into two columns.

2. In the left-hand column, write the chapter number(s) or the page number(s)
covered and a summary of the action or ideas expressed.
3. In the right-hand column, write your personal response to what you have read (at
least 5 entries). Think out loud on your paper. Many of your comments in the right-
hand column may be sentences or phrases, but some of them should be paragraphs
demonstrating your thoughtful consideration of the work. You may find it helpful to
use any of the following sentence openers as a way of beginning your personal
responses in the right hand column: