Reading Lists

Reading List

Your reading list for the summer. All books are available in any library, or you can come see me next week to sign out books. You should fill out a Reading Summary One Pager Document (see below) for each title that you read. It will make exam study and class room work much easier.

• The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

and one of the following

• The Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

• Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

• Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

• The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

• Generation X - Douglas Copeland

• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

You are of course welcome to read more than one.

With the above list it gives you an idea of what texts show up on the exam to be asked questions about or are encouraged to be used for the responses. 

Read the following quote from the web site the information was pulled from. 

"The AP English Literature and Composition exam is made up of two sections: a multiple-choice section and a free-response section. Firstly, in the multiple-choice section, students answer questions pertaining to passages of fiction, drama, or poetry. Next, in the free-response section, students analyze poetry and prose and write an argumentative essay centered on a text of their own choice or chosen from a list of 40 literary works. The problem for students preparing for the test is that there is no official AP lit reading list. Oedipus, Lady Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Mrs. Dalloway, Scout Finch, Huck Finn—all of them, plus hundreds more plucked from the pages of the literary canon, are liable to pop up on the AP Lit exam. That’s daunting.

So how exactly does one prep for this test, especially given the fact that there’s no authoritative AP Lit reading list to consult? Also, if a student wants to write their argumentative essay on a book not named on the test, how are they supposed to know which books are AP exam-worthy?

Luckily, by taking a look at AP Lit exams of years past, we can get a sense of which works are likelier than others to make an appearance. And we can get a sense for what the College Board considers exam-worthy. In other words: relax—you don’t have to slog through the entire oeuvres of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin et al. Below, I’ve compiled a totally unofficial AP Lit reading list—the 50 books that appeared most frequently on the exam since 1971."

Web Site: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/ap-lit-reading-list/