2025-2026 Required Reading and Assignments

The AP Literature and Composition course is meant to function as a college-level Introduction to Literature class, where the basics of literary analysis are applied to texts of high literary merit. AP students should be ready, on the first day of class, to demonstrate their mastery over high school level analysis and plunge into discourse on a collegiate level. Literary analysis moves well beyond a decoding of the literal events in a text, into a discussion of author’s craft. 

Students entering into Advanced Placement Literature and Composition MUST complete the following:

STEP 1: Building the Foundation

• Please obtain your own hard copy of How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Third Edition) by Thomas Foster (HTRLLAP). Read and enjoy it. It is a little irreverent but quite enlightening. As this is your own copy of the text, I would suggest highlighting the key points of each chapter and annotating as you go.

• Notes are not required; however, you will find that having notes/annotations will be exceedingly helpful as we move through the year. We will refer to this text constantly and with reckless abandon. Religions have their dogmatic text. AP Literature and Composition students have How to Read Literature Like a Professor.

STEP 2: The Novel

• You will read Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and take annotations that connect it to HTRLLAP. While reading, we expect you to annotate and/or use sticky, color-coded flags in the book for plot, characterization, literary devices and allusions, as well as connections to HTRLLAP. 

• You will choose any THREE chapters from HTRLLAP as a lens through which to analyze Demon Copperhead. This analysis will take the form of a well-organized essay that is TYPED into the document created for you on Google Classroom. DO NOT CREATE TABS IN YOUR DOCUMENT. No other document or copy of a document will be accepted. DO NOT PLAGIARIZE or make use of any AI for any part of this process. If you are considering passing off ideas as your own - whether they are the human or the artificial kind - then AP Literature and Composition is not the appropriate placement for you. This is your first assignment of the year, so make a good impression. In addition, be prepared to discuss Demon Copperhead and write an essay about this novel at the very beginning of the year.

STEP 3: Your Choice Novel and One-Pager

• Some of our major goals are to rekindle a love of reading for enjoyment, to increase your reading stamina, and ensure that you have a solid base of books to choose from for the AP test in May. For Step 3, you will select a work of fiction of literary merit. This means that you get to hunt for books that are designated award winners (they often have stickers or circles on the front). You are looking for winners and finalists for the: Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Booker Prize, International Booker Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, etc. 

If you’d like a starting point, here are titles that students have enjoyed in the past. Please note that you are not limited to this list by any means, and can search the THS Summer Reading Padlet to see if one of your favorite teachers has an award-winning title to recommend:

• Afterlives - Abdulrazak Gurnah

• James - Percival Everett

• Night Watch - Jayne Anne Phillips

• The Association of Small Bombs - Karan Mahajan

• Cutting For Stone - Abraham Verghese

• Flights or Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Takarczuk

• The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

• The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

• The Luminaries -  Eleanor Catton

• On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

• The Nickel Boys  - Colson Whitehead

• The Orphan Master’s Son - Adam Johnson

• Pachinko - Min Jin Lee

• Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Adichie

• Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

• The Sympathizer - Viet Than Nguyen