PWHS Honors English: Required Summer Reading

Ninth Grade Honors English: Required Reading

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 
  An incredible young adult novel about how a young girl’s love of books helps a community survive World War II and the Holocaust.

Ninth Grade Honors students: As you read The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, please complete the following assignment. Make a copy of the Google Doc into your school Google Drive account and then fill in the sections. You will submit this assignment to Canvas during the first week of school in August. Make sure to include page numbers where indicated. This sheet will help you prepare for class discussions in the fall as well as the summer reading assessment that you will take within the first week or two.

Please click here for The Book Thief test study guide. 

Tenth Grade Honors English: Required Reading

Select one:

• An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
  Annie grows up in Pittsburgh and explores, seeks a life of awareness, her eyes wide open to experience. Outstanding writing of childhood and of learning.

• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
  "Angela’s Ashes" is a memoir by Irish author Frank McCourt that tells the story of his childhood in Brooklyn and Ireland. It was published in 1996 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
   
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  Chopin’s most famous novel concerns a woman dissatisfied with her indifferent husband. This is a searing depiction of the religious and social pressures brought to bear on women who transgress restrictive Victorian codes of behavior.
   
• The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
  James McBride writes a powerful tribute to his white mother, one by whom he was often embarrassed yet whom he wanted protected. Growing up in an all-black project, McBride dealt with (and writes about) issues of identity, race and acceptance.
   
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  A black girl suffers brutal treatment at home and is sent off in marriage to a cruel man with children. She learns of possibilities from her sister and from a friend and becomes self-directed and happy.
   
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
  The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto — of lines of tired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized — is one of the greatest moments in literary history.
   
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
  The four Garcia sisters face a strange, new life in America when they are forced to flee the Dominican Republic because of the political climate. They recall memories of years past spent in their “home” country before coming to America.
   
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  A muck-raking novel about the problems of industry in America after the turn of the century; reformist.
   
• Lost in Yonkers by Neil Simon
  A humorous yet serious play about immigrants in New York’s Yonkers and their life. Pulitzer Prize-winner.

Eleventh Grade Honors English: Required Reading

• Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger 
  Holden Caulfield, about to be kicked out of yet another boarding school for flunking most of his courses, decides not to wait until the end of term and takes off for his hometown, Manhattan, a few days early. He figures he'll hole up in a cheap hotel, look up a few friends, then arrive home on time. But Holden is deeply troubled by the death of his beloved younger brother from leukemia, as well as a classmate's suicide. Alone in an uncaring city, his already fragile psyche begins to unravel. (Warning: some adult language and themes)

Eleventh Grade Honor students: Please click here for the Reading Comprehension Notes worksheet that you should use when reading Catcher in the Rye to prepare for class discussions in the fall.

Twelfth Grade Honors English and Writing Fellows:
Required Reading & Podcast Project

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch 
  Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
  
  Students will apply lessons from The Last Lecture as inspiration for the college and scholarship essays they will create during the first weeks of each semester.
   
• Click here to view the details of the required Podcast Project for incoming Twelfth Grade Honors students and Writing Fellows.