Students Entering Grade 11: Recommended/Required Summer Reading List

Required Reading:
Incoming Grade 11 Honors English Students

  • 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.

Required Reading:
Incoming Advanced Placement Students

Recommended Reading: All 11th Grade

  • An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Col. Chris Hadfield
    Shows how to make the impossible possible through the eyes of astronaut Chris Hadfield, as he conveys his experiences in years of training and space exploration, that has taught him not to visualize success, to care what others think, and to always sweat the small stuff.
     
  • Born a Crime by Trevor Noah 
    The author's unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that man's relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother--his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
     
  • Educated: a Memoir by Tara Westover
    A memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University. Though Westover's entrance into academia is remarkable, at its heart, her memoir is a family history: not just a tale of overcoming but an uncertain elegy to the life that she ultimately rejected. An exploration of family, history, and the narratives we create for ourselves, Educated becomes more than just a success story.
     
  • The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
    Starr Carter, 16, moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Whatt Starr does, or does not say, could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.
     
  • The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
    When 17-year-old Tana wakes up following a party, she finds herself in the aftermath of a violent  vampire attack, and along with her ex-boyfriend and a mysterious vampire boy, the only other survivors, she travels to Coldtown, a quarantined Massachusetts city full of vampires.
     
  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
    A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties. Ashoke Ganguli, a doctoral candidate at MIT, chose Gogol as a pet name for his and his wife's first-born because a volume of the Russian writer's work literally saved his own life, but in one of many confusions endured by the immigrant Bengali couple, Gogol ends up on the boy's birth certificate. Unaware of the dramatic story behind his unusual and, eventually, much hated name, Gogol refuses to read his namesake's work, and just before he leaves for Yale, he goes to court to change his name to Nikhil. Immensely relieves to escape his parents' stubbornly all-Bengali world,  he does his best to shed his Indianness, losing himself in the study of architecture and passionate if rocky love affairs.
     
  • Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
    In the year 2044, Wade Watts, like the rest of humanity, chooses to escape reality and spends his waking hours in the limitless, utopian virtual world of the OASIS, but when Wade stumbles upon the first of the fiendish puzzles set up by OASIS creator, James Halliday he finds he must compete with thousands of others--including those willing to commit murder--in order to claim a prize of massive fortune.
     

If you are having difficulty finding and acquiring a text for summer reading, please click here to email Lori Jolley in the Curriculum Department.