CONCORD HIGH SCHOOL SUGGESTED SUMMER READING LIST
FICTION
*** means it is highly recommended
Achebe, Chinua. No Longer at Ease (a sequel to Things Fall Apart) Adjustments are needed when new ways conflict with old ways.
Agee, James. A Death in the Family A family reacts to the sudden accidental death of the father.
Allende, Isabel. Eva Luna: Eva loves a Turkish merchant, a guerrilla fighter, and a German immigrant while triumphing over harsh reality through creativity and imagination. House of Spirits: Four generations of women with unnatural powers witness upheaval in South America.
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Young people come to terms with life and learn the meaning of love a hundred years ago.
Asimov, Isaac. Nemesis. Earthlings seek to escape the overcrowded planet in 2236.Atwood, Margaret. Cat's Eye. As an adult Elaine returns to Toronto to confront her unhappy past.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey. Excellent movie of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier (1940).
Baldwin, James. Go Tell it on the Mountain. A tale of the African-American experience.Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. In one day, a man attempts to rescue himself and his dignity from ruin.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penniless makes her way in the world of 19th century England and stumbles on a mystery in her master’s house. Excellent movie with Orson Welles (1940).
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Tempestuous love story: stable boy rises to wealth and uses it to try to gain the woman he loves, who loves money. Excellent movie starring Laurence Olivier (1939).
Camus, Albert. The Plague (La Peste). An allegory about the spiritual plague of Nazism. The Stranger. Meursault is innocently drawn into a senseless murder in Algeria.
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Poor white trash southern girl reinvents herself as the glamorous Holly Golightly in New York. The Audrey movie, of course.
Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Father Latour wins the Southwest for Catholicism.
Cheever, John. Collected Stories. Darkness can hide behind happiness and success. The Wapshot Chronicle. The breakdown of a small fishing village and its people is revealed.
Chekhov, Anton. The Three Sisters. Lives are momentarily brightened when the imperial army comes to town.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Edna's affair inflames her heart and blinds her to all else, even her children.
Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. Bored cowboys in 1880 Nevada. Best study of lynch-mob mentality ever written, and in the first person. Good movie starring Henry Fonda (1943).
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer and Last of the Mohicans. The western frontier with Hurons, Mohicans and white bounty hunters. Movie starring Daniel Day Lewis. Also read Twain’s essay, “Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. A young soldier faces the horror of battle in the Civil War. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets. Courage has a good movie starring WWII hero Audie Murphy, America’s real-life most decorated soldier in WWII.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Hard Times.
Dostoevski, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov thinks he is an übermensch and can commit the perfect crime. The Brothers Karamazov. Russian family drama and human nature.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Working-class boy falls in love with gorgeous boss’s daughter but needs to get his working-class girl friend out of the way first. Excellent movie called A Place in the Sun w/Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.
Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. White men's greed destroys the Chipawa Indians as told from two opposing view points.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury: three children and the servants tell of the decline and fall of a family. As I Lay Dying: the whole family, including the deceased, narrate this trek across Mississippi to bury mother. Intruder in the Dust: murder mystery explores race relations. The Reivers: comic story of an eleven-year-old car thief.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby, The Last Tycoon. Tender Is the Night: a wife's growing strength highlights her husband's decline. Short stories, especially May Day, Bernice Bobs Her Hair, and The Crack-Up. Essay on the Jazz Age. Many movies of Gatsby, latest starring Robert Redford.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Trophy wife trapped in an unhappy marriage wants a real life, with tragic results. Movie w/Jennifer Jones.
Gardner, John. Grendel. The Beowolf epic set in the Middle Ages about a hero who kills monsters is retold from the point of view of Grendel, the monster.
Gordimer, Nadine. My Son's Story. The apartheid movement affects the relationship between a father and son.
Hardy, Thomas. Wessex Tales: short stories. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: a dairy maid is seduced and abandoned. The Mayor of Casterbridge: a man loses his wife in a card game.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. A tale of hereditary sin based on the legend of a curse. The Scarlet Letter. Short stories especially Young Goodman Brown.Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. Bloody, biting satire about the dehumanizing effects of the WWII military bureaucracy. Great movie starring Jon Voigt, Angelina Jolie’s father.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms: love tries to grow amid the horror of World War I in Italy. For Whom the Bell Tolls: American guerrilla fights fascism in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and falls in love with a young Spanish woman. The Sun Also Rises: the lost generation after WWI struggles to make sense of life while they party across Europe and go to bull fights. A Moveable Feast: recollections of life in France in the 1920s with Fitzgerald and the other expatriate American writers. Short stories, especially The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Movies abound.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. A dehumanizing future where people are genetically engineered into classes and drugs block human emotions.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Short stories about the quintessential Irish city and its inhabitants. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Semi-autobiographical.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A fun-loving mental patient (Jack Nicholson’s Best Actor performance in the movie) struggles for the hearts of the patients against fascistic Big Nurse (Louise Fletcher’s Best Actress performance). Also Best Picture, Best Director.Kinsella, W.P. Shoeless Joe. “If you build it, he will come – or is it, He will come?”
Kosinski, Jerzy. The Painted Bird. After losing his parents, a boy wanders throughout Europe after WWII.
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. An abnormally close mother-son relationship makes Paul unable to love as an adult.
Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street and Babbitt. Dark satires about social climbers in the 1920s. Elmer Gantry satirizes a stupid, lying, debauching drunk who becomes a pillar of the religious community. Burt Lancaster won Best Actor for his performance in the 1960 movie.London, Jack. The Sea Wolf, Call of the Wild, White Fang. London’s stories of adventure at sea and in Alaska. The latter two are about dogs: in Call of the Wild, a tame dog becomes wild; in White Fang, a wild dog has to cope with civilization. Movie w/Ethan Hawke. Short Story: “To Build a Fire.”
McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. This second book of The Border Trilogy follows teenage Billy from his ranch to Mexico.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Embraces humanity with tenderness. And makes an excellent movie.Melville, Herman. Typee and Omoo. Yankee sailors flee their ship for a flawed Eden in Polynesia. Billy Budd: good and evil confront each other in a mutiny. Moby Dick: good and evil on a hunt for the Great White Whale.
More, Thomas. Utopia. Four hundred years ago Thomas More dreamed of a better world.
Naipaul, V. S. Mystic Masseur. Satire about an Indian in Trinidad who becomes a pillar of the British Empire.
Norris, Frank. The Octopus. Clash between wheat growers and the railroad "tentacles" that thrust across the fertile valley in California.O'Connor, Edwin. The Last Hurrah. The final race for mayor of Boston by an Irish political boss.
Orwell, George. 1984. It’s dangerous to be in love in a dehumanizing future where a totalitarian government brainwashes people into thinking it’s just like their Big Brother.
Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country. A Zulu pastor and his son experience the turbulence of South Africa.
Salinger, J. D. Catcher in the Rye. Holden leaves prep school and goes underground in New York for three days. He keeps the pain to himself and gives the pleasure away. Franny and Zooey: two stories about members of the Glass family of New York.Sayres, Dorothy. Murder Must Advertise. Beautifully written thriller.
Shange, Ntozake. Betsey Brown. A young black girl grows up in St. Louis at the beginning of integration.
***Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle: horrors of meat-packing in Chicago resulted in the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. The Millennium: futuristic novel in which 14 people rebuild the world.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A typical day in a forced-labor camp in Siberia.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Repossessed farmers flee the Dust Bowl for California during the depression. John Ford won Best Director for the 1940 movie starring Henry Fonda. Also, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a satire about the French Revolution.Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife. Beautifully written novels about Asian-American women.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Unhappy in her marriage, Anna develops a dangerous passion for Count Vronsky.
*** Voltaire. Candide. Candide believes that he lives in the "best of all possible worlds." One of the great satires of all time.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Billy Pilgrim survives WWII, is kidnapped to the planet Tralfamadore and becomes part of their zoo display.
Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. African-American Celie struggles for empowerment against a life of abuse and lack of education. Steven Spielberg directed the movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover.
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men. The life of Huey Long, the governor of Louisiana, is fictionalized. Made into two movies, one in 1950 for which Broderick Crawford (who later went on to star in Dragnet on television) won the Academy Award for Best Actor, and one starring John Goodman.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. A portrait hidden in the attic ages while Dorian himself does not. Good movie w/Angela Lansbury.
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. Coming of age, a journey from rural North Carolina to Harvard and Boston.
Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny. Mutiny aboard a World War II ship pits a maturing Keith against a fanatical Captain Queeg, played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1954 movie.
Wright, Richard. Native Son and Black Boy are gut-wrenching stories of growing up under segregation.
B. GREEK AND ROMAN DRAMA AND POETRY
GREEK TRAGEDIES:
Aeschylus. The Oresteia.
Euripides. Orestes, Electra, Medea.
Sophocles. Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. In Oedipus, a man discovers the truth about his past, his parents, and himself. In Oedipus at Colonus, he goes into exile. In Antigone, his daughter faces death when she must decide whether to obey the laws of the gods or of men. Linda prefers the colloquial translation by Kelly Cherry. Ira prefers more traditional translations.
GREEK COMEDIES:
Aristophanes. Any play, especially The Clouds, The Frogs, The Birds, Lysistrata.
GREEK AND ROMAN POETRY:
Catullus. Delicious satires about love, upper-class Romans, and human nature.
Homer. Epics: The Iliad. The real Troy, all 10 years and the horse. The Odyssey. One man’s 10-year trip back home to his wife and the son who was an infant when he left.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Roman myths.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Epic poem about Rome. If you like The Iliad and The Odyssey, you’ll love this.
If you are interested in ancient Greece and Rome, also see novels of HISTORICAL FICTION by Robert Graves and Mary Renault. Also, any GREEK AND ROMAN MYTHOLOGY.
C. OTHER DRAMA AND POETRY
Hellman, Lillian. Watch on the Rhine. An American family is affected by fascism and the refugees they help. The Little Foxes. Domineering Regina will kill to get the fortune from her southern family. Both movies starred Bette Davis.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House. A young wife confronts a male-dominated and authoritarian society.
Miller, Arthur. All My Sons. The events and actions of the past are always in the present and the future. The Crucible. It is set during the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, but it’s really about McCarthyism and America in 1952.
*** O'Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night. Mom is a morphine addict. Autobiographical masterpiece about a seemingly respectable family that is seriously dysfunctional. Brilliant movie starring Katharine Hepburn. Also The Emperor Jones and Mourning Becomes Electra, which is based on The Oresteia.
Rostand, Edmund. Cyrano de Bergerac. A desperately in love man thinks he isn’t good-looking enough so he convinces a good-looking guy to go talk to the girl. But the good-looking guy is dumb so he has to feed him lines. The Steve Martin movie Roxanne is an updated version of this play.
Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit. In this existential play, hell is other people.
Shakespeare, William. Any play, any poetry.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. On a bet, an upper-class man transforms a lower-class girl into a lady, with humorous and unforeseen consequences. The play My Fair Lady is based on Pygmalion. St. Joan: Joan of Arc. Arms and the Man: the war between the sexes includes a trip to hell and lines like “You are a lady, and wherever ladies are is hell.”
Shepard, Sam. Buried Child. Burying the loneliness and the secret lives of families.
Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia; Indian Ink. Biting satire.
Wilson August. Two Trains Running. Racism in a 1960s Pittsburgh diner.
D. BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AND NON-FICTION
Agee, James. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Ironic title for a study of the lives of poor whites in the South during the depression. For the lives of descendants of slaves during the depression, see Shadow of the Plantation by Charles Johnson.
Alderman, Clifford. Devil's Shadow: Story of Witchcraft in Massachusetts.Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. An early Harlem childhood leads to involvement in the civil rights movement.Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. Portrays struggles to escape desperate poverty in Harlem.Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart. at Wounded Knee. A Native American history of the American West.Brown, Michael. Laying Waste. The poisoning of America by toxic waste.Cary, Lorene. Black Ice. An African-American woman in an all white school struggles to succeed without selling out.
Catton, Bruce. A Stillness at Appomattox. The conflict between Lee and Grant foreshadows the end of hope for the Confederacy. Anything by Catton is good.
Cohen, Patricia Kline. A Calculating People. Fascinating study of how the use of numbers and math developed in the U.S. from the colonies through the invention of bookkeeping in the 19th century.
Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood. Memories of childhood (you do what you do out of a private passion for the thing itself).Haley, Alex. Roots. From 1750 in an African village to seven generations later in America.Hersey, John. Hiroshima. The story of those who survived the bombing of Hiroshima.Janson, H.W. History of Art. The standard reference book on western art.
Johnson, Charles. Shadow of the Plantation. The descendants of slaves in the South during the depression. For whites during the depression, see Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Agee.
Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: biography of Mark Twain. Walt Whitman: biography of Walt Whitman.Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage. Hard decisions by eight US Senators who favored the good of the nation, often ending their careers.
Manchester, William. Goodbye, Darkness. This autobiography is one of the best books about WWII. Manchester, a marine who fought in the Pacific, goes back over the terrain and the memories. He received a full disability pension after the war because an explosion embedded shrapnel in him. The shrapnel was bone fragments from the man standing next to him.
Moon, William Least Heat. Blue Highways. A 20th century Native American takes a 13,000-mile odyssey along the blue roads of the highway map.
O'Brien, Tim The Things They Carried. The Vietnam war.
Quinn, Susan. Madame Curie. The Polish woman who won two Nobel prizes, one for physics, for discovering radium; and one for chemistry. Major movie in 1943.
Preston, Richard. The Hot Zone: terrifying story about Ebola fever. The Demon in the Freezer: smallpox stockpiled by the U.S. and Russia, much of it unaccounted for.
Rodriguez, Richard. The Hunger of Memory. What price do immigrant children pay for social assimilation and academic success?
Roueché, Berton. Medical Detectives. Essays from The New Yorker about cases in the files of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) like the last outbreak of smallpox in the U.S. (in the 1940s).
Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings: a group of people who have been in comas for decades suddenly respond to medication. Movie starring Robert DeNiro and Robin Williams. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: essays about neurological abnormalities.
Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. WWII, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials are explored.
Terry, Wallace. Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Living simply, in harmony with nature in Massachusetts in the 19th century.Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Classic biographies of the Renaissance masters before they became Ninja Turtles.
Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff. Space flight from 1947 to the Mercury project, astronauts Yeager, Conrad, Grissom and Glenn. Excellent movie.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Woolf ponders the differences in the lives of men and women.