The truly motivated college-bound student explores the "challenging storehouse of insights and ideas found in high quality literature." Success in Honors English, as in college, is directly related to the amount and quality of literature students read. Reading increases fluency, vocabulary, critical thinking, SAT and Advanced Placement Test scores.
The following foundation works provide rich material which Honors English teachers will allude to in teaching the course of study. Throughout the school year, while studying other core works, students will be expected to make references, comparing and contrasting universal themes, memorable characters, and authors' writing styles found in their summer reading. Consequently, Honors and AP level courses have extended content and an additional workload that sets them apart from the regular college prep high school courses in the same subject.
The W.H.S. Language Arts Department requires the Honors and
Advanced Placement Program students to read the following two books and submit the summer reading assignment on the first day of English class.
Incoming Honors Freshmen |
Incoming Honors Sophomores | Incoming Honors Juniors | Incoming Advanced Placement Seniors |
The Natural by Malamud |
Jane Eyre by Bronte |
Cannery Rowby Steinbeck |
The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner |
A Separate Peace by Knowles |
The Wide Sargasso Sea by Rhys |
A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway |
Love in the Time of Cholera by Marquez |
Age of Innocence by Wharton
Ethan Frome by Wharton
My Antonia by Cather
Les Miserables by Hugo
Call of the Wild by London
Bleak House by Dickens
One-Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
The Stranger by Camus
Madame Bovary by Flaubert
A Room With a View by Forster
The Red Badge of Courage by Crane
Sophie's World by Gaardner
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Douglass
1776 by McCullough
The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas
Tess of the Durbervilles by Hardy
David Copperfield by Dickens
Native Son by Wright
Obasan by Kogawa
The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway
Arcadia by Sidney
Going After Cacciato by O'Brien
A Doll's House by Ibsen
The Shipping News by Proulx
Cry the Beloved Country by Paton
Wuthering Heights by Bronte
Light in August by Faulkner
Invisible Man by Ellison
John Adams by McCullough
In Another Country by Kenney
The Interpreter of Maladies by Lahiri
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston
Bless Me Ultima by Anaya
Things Fall Apart by Achebe
Siddhartha by Hesse
The Kite Runner by Hosseini
Woman Warrior by Kingston
As I Lay Dying by Faulkner
Pride and Prejudice by Austen
Sense and Sensibility by Austen
Catch-22 by Heller
Moby Dick by Melville
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale by Atwood
The Things They Carried by O'Brien
In the Time of the Butterflies by Alvarez
Jude the Obscure by Hardy
The Fountainhead by Rand
Johnny Got His Gun by Trumbo
The Color Purple by Walker
All the King's Men by Warren
The Awakening by Chopin
1984 by Orwell
Animal Farm by Orwell
Brave New World by Huxley
Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky
Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway
Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Franklin
The Bell Jar by Plath
A Passage to India by Forster
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce
Gulliver's Travels by Swift
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Kesey
One-Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Dillard
The Metamorphosis by Kafka
CLASSICS
Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio (small-town life U.S.A turn of 20th c.)
Austen: Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility
Bronte Sisters: Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre
Camus: The Stranger, The Plague
Cather: My Antonia
Chaucer: Canterbury Tales
Chopin: The Awakening
Conrad: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness
Crane: The Red Badge of Courage (young soldier in the Civil War; you might like it if you enjoyed All Quiet...)
Dickens: Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Pickwick Papers
Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo
Dostoyevsky: Crime & Punishment (intense psychological study of a violent criminal), The Brothers Karamzov, The Idiot
Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Dumas: Count of Monte Cristo, Three Musketeers
Eliot: The Mill on The Floss, Middlemarch, Silas Marner
Faulkner: As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and The Damned.
Flaubert: Madam Bovary
Hardy: Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Man & the Sea, The Sun Also Rises
Hugo: Les Miserables
Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley: Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited
James: The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The Europeans
Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses (a real challenge!)
Kafka: Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, A Hunger Artist
Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
London: Call of the Wild
Melville: Billy Budd
Miller: Crucible, Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, Incident at Vichy
Malory: Le Mort D'Arthur (authoritative Arthurian legend)
Orwell: Animal Farm, 1984
Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Paton: Cry the Beloved Country
Poe: Short Stories
Salinger: Catcher in the Rye
Shelly: Frankenstein
Scott: Ivanhoe
Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charley, Tortilla Flats
Thoreau: Walden
Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Twain: The Adventures of Huck Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Wells: War of the Worlds, The Time Machine
Wilder: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth (plays)
Williams: Streetcar Named Desire, Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (plays)
Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (explores the connections between politics, reproduction, and gender in the future)
Burgess: A Clockwork Orange
Capote: In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany's
Greene: The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The End of the Affair
Heller: Catch 22 (if you like M.A.S.H. you might like this one)
Kantor: Andersonville (notorious Civil War prison)
Kerouac: On the Road, The Dharma Bums
Kesey: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion
Knowles: A Separate Peace
Mitchell: Gone with the Wind
Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (satire about worldwide conspiracy)
Rand: The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, Anthem (Influential author founded the philosophy known as Objectivism)
Read: Alive (survival of soccer team that crashed in Andes)
Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Trumbo: Johnny Got his Gun
Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle
Wouk: The Caine Mutiny
Anderson: Jack and Jackie (current bio of the Kennedys)
Burroughs: Running with Scissors: A Memoir, Dry
Camus: The First Man (early days in Algeria and Paris)
David & Davis: Hammer of the Gods (Led Zeppelin Biography)
Feynman: You Must be Joking, Mr. Feynman
Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (new edition, added material)
Franklin: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Graham: Dove (teenager sails around the world)
Gunther: Death be Not Proud (story of his teenage son's illness)
Hays: My Old Man and the Sea (dad & son sail around world)
Herriott: All Creatures Great and Small Series (rural veterinarian, if you love animals, you'll probably love this book)
Hopkins/Singerman: No One Gets Out of Here Alive (Biography of The Doors)
Kaysen: Girl Interrupted (teenager who describes her year in an institution)
King: On Writing (Stephen King's memoirs after a near-death car accident)
Kirkland: Dancing on My Grave (ballerina)
Lawrence: Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lunda: Eric (a young man's illness)
McCourt: Angela's Ashes (English teacher's memoir of growing up in Ireland), 'Tis (the sequel), Teacher Man
Nisenson: Ascension (biog. of John Coltrane)
Norman: Shout! A History of the Beatles
Piccolo: A Short Season (movie was "Brian's Song")
Plath: The Bell Jar (story of a young girl who wins a writing contest and gets to move to New York City)
Roberts: The Man Who Listened to Horses
Sebold: Lucky (author's memoir of her rape & recovery which inspired her novel The Lovely Bones)
Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim, Naked, Holidays on Ice
TenBoom: The Hiding Place (Dutch woman who hid Jews during W.W.II)
Terkel: Working (people talking about their jobs)
Valens: Other Side of the Mountain (female skier)
White: Catch the Fire (bio of Bob Marley)
Winchester: The Professor and the Madman (the making of the Oxford English Dictionary)
Alperovitz: Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb
Ambrose: Citizen Soldiers (invasion of Normandy etc.), D-Day (same topic)
Bishop: The Day Lincoln was Shot
Bugliosi: Outrage (reflections on OJ trial)
Burdick & Lederer: The Ugly American (Satirical critique of U.S. policy in South-East Asia during the '60s.)
Brokaw: The Greatest Generation (WWII and Homefront)
Cable: The Case of the Slave Ship Amistad
Caputo: Rumor of War (Vietnam War novel)
Fallaci: Interviews with History (feisty female journalist interviews famous leaders)
Fuller: The Day we Bombed Utah (radiation accident)
Gies: Anne Frank Remembered (Personal narrative of Miep Gies, a Nazi-resistor who hid Jews during WWII)
Harr: A Civil Action (a town sues an industrial polluter)
Herr: Dispatches (Vietnam)
Kovic: Born on the Fourth of July (U.S.Vietnam War vet’s memoir)
Lifton & Mitchell: Hiroshima in America
Manchester: American Caesar (biography of Douglas MacArthur)
McCullough: Truman
McCullough: John Adams (biography and American Revolution)
McCullough: 1776 (American Revolution)
Moorehead: Lost and Found (archeology-discovery of Troy)
O'Brien: Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried (both Vietnam stories)
Pipher: Reviving Ophelia (psychology, being young & female in the 90s and dealing with expectations of perfection)
Scheer: Thinking Tuna Fish, Talking Death (essays by L.A. Times journalist)
Shaara: Killer Angels (about the Civil War)
Shilts: And the Band Played On (history of AIDS in America)
Shirer: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Shute: On the Beach (aftermath of nuclear war)
Takaki: Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Bomb
Tolstikov: Gold of Troy (archeology- discovery of Troy)
Vowell: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Assassination Vacation (bits of US History with all the details that may have been too scandalous for your history book told by a hip and darkly funny young author) who is excited by US History)
Woodward & Bernstein: All the Presidents' Men (the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal)
Abbey: The Monkey Wrench Gang
Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series
Allen: Side Effects
Burroughs: Running with Scissors: A Memoir
Toole: Confederacy of Dunces
Sedaris: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim, Naked, Holidays on Ice
Wibberly: The Mouse that Roared
Bierce: Ghost & Horror Stories
Christie: Ten Little Indians/ And Then There Were None (same book), Murder on the Orient Express
Clancy: Hunt for Red October, Clear and Present Danger, Patriots Game, Raise the Titanic
Clark: A Cry in the Night, While My Pretty One Sleeps, All Around the Town, Nighttime Is My Time
Cook: Coma, Shock, Year of the Intern, Sphinx, Chromosome 6, Abduction (medical thrillers)
Follet: The Hammer of Eden, Eye of the Needle, Night Over Water, Pillars of Earth
Forsyth: The Odessa File (spys, intrigue, etc.)
Hillerman: anything (Native American detective in southwest)
King: It, Pet Cemetery, The Tommyknockers, Carrie, Cujo, Christine, Misery
Koontz: Twilight Eyes, Watchers, False Memory, Seize the Night (Koontz resides in OC; you may recognize the setting)
L'Amour: Sackett series, Beyond the Great Snow Mountains
Ludlum: Hades Factor, Bourne Identity, Matarese Countdown, Scorpio Illusion
McCarthy: The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain
McMurtry: Lonesome Dove
Paterson: Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls (crime, mystery demented serial killers)
Stoker: Dracula
Abbot: Flatland
Anthony: A Spell for Chameleon
Asimov: Foundation books
Barker: Weave World
Benford: (UCI professor) Timescape, Art of the Comet
Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles
Card: Enders Game, Xenocide, Treasure Box
Clark: Songs from Distant Earth, 2001, 2010, 2063
Cook: Conia
Crichton: Andromeda Strain, Congo
Frank: Alas Babylon
Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land
Herbert: The Dune series
Kidder: Soul of a New Machine
LeGuin: Lathe of Heaven
Rice: Merrick, Lestat, Interview with the Vampire, Servant of the Bones
Palahniuk: Haunted, Diary, Lullaby
Rice: Merrick, Lestat, Interview with the Vampire, Servant of the Bones
Robinson: The Wild Shore, Blue Mars
Stewart: Earth Abides (supposed to be VERY good...)
Steinbeck: The Acts of King Author and His Noble Knights
Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
White: The Once and Future King, The Book of Merlin (Arthurian Legend with a side of anti-fascism)
Zelazny, The Amber Chronicles (series), This Immortal, The Dream Masters, Lord of Light
Aczel: Fermat's Last Theorem (amazing story of a math problem)
Eisely: Immense Journey, Darwin's Century
Hawking: A Brief History of Time
Masson: When Elephants Weep (emotional lives of animals)
Mowat: A Whale for the Killing, Never Cry Wolf
Schacter: Searching for Memory (about human brain & memory)
Thomas: Lives of a Cell, Late Night Thoughts While Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony
Aaron/ Wheeler: If I Were a Hammer: The Hank Aaron Story
Bissinger: Friday Night Lights (football)
Boswell: How Life Imitates the World Series
Boukreev: The Climb
Bouton: Ball Four (baseball)
Hemingway: Death in the Afternoon (bullfighting)
Jabbar: Giant Steps (Kareem's autobiography)
Junger: The Perfect Storm (fishing boat tragedy in Atlantic Ocean)
Kahn: Boys of Summer (baseball)
Kinsella: Shoeless Joe
Krakauer: Into Thin Air (recent fatal Everest expedition), Into the Wild (young man's tragic wilderness experience)
Malamud: The Natural (baseball), A New Life
Moceanu: Dominique Moceanu, An American Champion (gymnast)
Plimpton: Open Net (hockey), Paper Lion (football), Homerun
Salassi: On the Ropes (wrestling)
Sayre: I Am Third (pro football, "Brian's Song" based on this story)
Voight: The Runner (track)
African-American
Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Heart of a Woman
Baldwin: Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country
Childress: A Hero Ain't Nothin’ but a Sandwich, Rainbow Jordon
Griffin: Black Like Me
Haley: Autobiography of Malcolm X, Roots
Morrison: Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, Tar Baby, The Bluest Eye, Sula
Reed: Mumbo Jumbo ("satirical, racy, and uproarious commentary on our society")
Walker: The Color Purple, Meridian
Wright: Native Son, Black Boy
Hispanic/Latino
Allende: House of the Spirits (Chilean)
Alvarez: How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, In the Time of the Butterflies
Cisneros: Woman Hollering Creek, House on Mango Street
Esquivel: Like Water for Chocolate
Fuentes: The Old Gringo
Garcia: Dreaming in Cuban, The Aguero Sisters
Marquez: 100 Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth
Rodriquez: Hunger of Memory (Chicano male deals with two cultures)
Saramago: Blindness (Nobel Prize-winning author)
Thornton: Imagining Argentina
Asian
Butler: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (short stories about Vietnamese characters)
Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha
Guterson: Snow Falling on Cedars (deals partially with Japanese internment)
Hayslip: Heaven and Earth (a Vietnamese woman's story)
Hwang, Sun-won: The Book of Masks (South Korean explores the theme of artificial division)
Jen: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land
Kang: Home Was the Land of the Morning Calm
Karlin: The Other Side of Heaven (postwar fiction about Vietnam)
Kingston: The Woman Warrior (Chinese generational story)
Lee: China Boy (story of growing up in 1950s San Francisco)
Levine: In Search of Sugihara (the Japanese "Schindler" who saved Jews)
Liu: The Accidental Asia, Notes of a Native Speaker
Mah: The Story of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter (rumor has it that this author now lives in H.B.)
Mori: Shizuko's Daughter
See: On Gold Mountain (bi-racial Chinese/Caucasian family history)
Tan, Amy: The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife
Thu Hng Dng: Novel Without a Name (North Vietnamese army officer's story)
Waston: Farewell to Mazanar (Japanese internment camps)
Yoshimoto: Kitchen
Swain: River of Time (Journalist working in Vietnam and Cambodia)
Uchida: Picture Bride
Vietnam: A Traveler's Literary Companion (anthology of Vietnamese writers)
Jewish
Appleman-Jurman: Alicia: My Story (Polish female survivor of WWII; now lives in OC; she spoke at FVHS)
Fast: The Immigrants
Fink: A Scrap of Time (short stories of pre-Holocaust Poland)
Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (new edition)
Gies: Anne Frank Remembered (Personal account of Miep Gies, a Nazi-resistor who hid Jews during WWII)
Kaplan: Scroll of Agony (about the Warsaw ghetto)
Keneally: Schindler's List
Linenthal: Preserving Memory (problems trying to create the Holocaust Museum)
Potok: The Chosen (set in 1940s Brooklyn, the story of two Jewish friends from diverse backgrounds) The Promise
Singer: The Family of Moskat, The Magician of Lubin...
Spiegelman: Maus 1, Maus 2 (Pulitzer Prize-winning Graphic Novel Holocaust story)
Uris: Mila 18 (deals with the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw ghetto)
Wiesel: Night
Native American
Alexie: Lone Ranger & Tanto Fistfight in Heaven (life on a Spokane area reservation), Reservation Blues
Berger: Little Big Man
Craven: I Heard the Owl Call My Name (young English missionary to Kwakiutl people in Canada)
DeLoria: Custer Died for Your Sins (contemporary Native American discusses U.S. Culture)
Erdich: Love Medicine, The Best Queen (contemporary female author)
Momaday: House Made of Dawn, Way to Rainy Mountain
Niehardt: Black Elk Speaks
Steiner: The New Indian
Indian
Mukherjee: Jasmine, The Middleman and Other Stories
Roy: The God of Small Things
Other
Balakian: Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past
Filipovic: Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo
Gruwell: The Freedom Writers Diary (students from Wilson H.S. use writing to break through cultural barriers.)
Hosseini: The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Summers
Mayle: A Year in Provence (An Englishman fulfills his dream of living in Provence, France)
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