Literature
Literature Monthly Assignment:
for each month read and discuss:
One work of literature (9 per year),
for each month read and discuss:
One work of literature (9 per year),
Why Study Literature?
- Fosters critical thinking
- Builds understanding of a broader world
- Provides understanding of the student's own culture and other cultures through story
- Draws students out of the narrow view from their own lives
- Builds a large and wide-ranging vocabulary
- Builds both writing and reading abilities
- Enables the ability to participate in more complex thinking and discussion
How to Choose Literature for the Year
- Each year, include a variety of novels, one play or one work of Shakespeare, and one biography.
- A suggestion is to choose a variety of genres and authors. Select a variety of difficulty levels too.
- Involve the student in the choices, encouraging him/her to read a review/synopsis of each book.
- Use the Lexile site to make sure selected books are appropriate for the student's independent reading level. Lexile levels should be a GUIDE, not an iron-clad rule.
- The Lexile site offers the “Find a Book” search tool, a feature that can estimate a child's Lexile range based on the most recent grade he or she has completed and his or her overall comfort with the materials at that grade level."
- If you are not sure of your student's Lexile level, you can reference the Lexile-to-Grade Correspondence page. According to the Lexile site, high school level books should be 9th: 9880L to 1170L; 10th:10920L to 1200L; 11th: 11940L to 1210L
12th: 12950L to 1220L. - If you are working within a district, be mindful of their requirements and recommendations for literature selections.
- Consider the wide variety of selections below:
Possible Literature Selections
American Literature The Scarlet Letter: Nathaniel Hawthorne A Farewell to Arms: Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea: Ernest Hemmingway The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain Of Mice and Men: John Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck Moby Dick: Herman Melville To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee All Quiet on the Western Front: Erich Maria Remarque Ethan Frome: Edith Wharton Civil Disobedience: Henry David Thoreau Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Harriet Beecher Stowe A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith Gone with the Wind: Margaret Mitchell The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: Ernest Gaines Main Street: Sinclair Lewis Call of the Wild: Jack London Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: Brown, Dee Hiroshima: Hersey, John Killer Angels: Michael Shara The House on Mango Street: Sandra Cisneros The Power and the Glory: Graham Greene Ceremony: Leslie Marmon Silko The Pearl: John Steinbeck Ancient /Middle Ages Literature The Epic of Gilgamesh The Iliad The Odyssey The Argonauts The Aeneid Oedipus Rex: Sophocles The Republic: Plato Beowulf The Inferno: Dante British/European Literature Canterbury Tales: Geoffrey Chaucer Great Expectations: Charles Dickens Oliver Twist: Charles Dickens David Copperfield: Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities: Charles Dickens Silas Marner: George Eliot Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austin Sense and Sensibility: Jane Austin Emma: Jane Austin Ivanhoe: Sir Walter Scott Gulliver’s Travels: Jonathon Swift The Picture of Dorian Grey: Oscar Wilde Once and Future King: T.H White Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë The Mayor of Casterbridge: Thomas Hardy Tess of the d’Ubervilles: Thomas Hardy Far From the Madding Crowd: Thomas Hardy The Great Gatsby: F. Scott Fitzgerald How Green Was My Valley: Richard Llewellyn The Book Thief : Markus Zusak All Creatures Great and Small: James Herriot Novels set throughout the world/world authors Crime and Punishment: Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Power of One: by Bryce Courtenay The Alchemist: Paulo Coelho Cyrano de Bergerac: Edmond Rostand The Good Earth: Pearl S. Buck Cry, the Beloved Country: by Alan Paton Heart of Darkness: by Joseph Conrad The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini Night: Elie Wiesel Don Quixote: Miguel de Cervantes Les Miserables: Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Victor Hugo The Man in the Iron Mask: Alexander Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexander Dumas The Three Musketeers: Alexander Dumas Robinson Crusoe: Daniel DeFoe The Mill on the Floss: George Eliot Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak Frankenstein: Mary W. Shelley One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: Aleksander Solzhenitsyn Anna Karenina: Leo Tolstoy Please Look After Mom: Kyung-sook Shin The Time Machine: H.G. Wells To Destroy You Is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family: The Prince: Machiavelli, Niccolo The Scarlett Pimpernal: by Baroness Orczy No God in Sight: Altaf Tyrewala A Bottle in the Gaza Sea: Valérie Zenatti The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness: Simon Wiesenthal Coming of Age A Separate Peace: John Knowles The Chosen: Chaim Potok Bless the Beasts and Children Dove: Robin L. Graham and Derek L. T. Gill A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in Urban America: Kotlowitz, Alex Biography/Autobiography The Diary of Anne Frank: Anne Frank The Autobiography of Malcolm X : Malcolm X Strings Attached: Life Lessons from the World's Toughest Teacher: Joanne Lipman Days of Grace: Ashe, Arthur and Arnold Rampersad. Growing Up: Baker, Russell Madame Curie: Curie, Eve Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years: Delany, Sara and A. Elizabeth with Amy Hill Hearth The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: Franklin, Benjamin Roots: Haley, Alex The Story of My Life: Keller, Helen Born on the Fourth of July: Kovic, Ron Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa: Mathabane, Mark This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer: Mills, Kay Not Without My Daughter: Mahmoody, Betty My Name Is Mahtob: The Story that Began in the Global Phenomenon Not Without My Daughter Continues: Mahtob Mahmoody Fantasy/Science Fiction Lord of the Rings Trilogy: JRR Tolkien The Martian Chronicles: Ray Bradbury Dracula: Bram Stoker Watchmen: Alan Moore Dune: Frank Herbert Dystopian Literature Lord of the Flies: William Golding 1984: George Orwell Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury The Road: Cormac McCarthy Modern Literature The Things they Carried: Tim O'Brien The Bean Trees: Barbara Kingsolver The Joy Luck Club: Amy Tan Atonement: Ian McEwan Slaughterhouse-Five: Kurt Vonnegut The Outsiders: S.E. Hinton Siddhartha: Hermann Hesse Tuesdays with Morrie: Mitch Albom The Secret Life of Bees: Sue Monk Kidd Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Jonathan Safran Foer The Alchemist: Paulo Coelho The Great Divorce: C.S. Lewis The Math Olympian: Richard Hoshino Edna in the Desert: Maddy Lederman Winter Wheat: Mildred Walker Peace Like a River: Leif Enger Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet Much Ado about Nothing A Midsummer Night’s Dream Julius Caesar Henry V Macbeth Hamlet Twelfth Night Othello The Taming of the Shrew Drama The Crucible: Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller The Importance of Being Ernest: Oscar Wilde Saint Joan: George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion: George Bernard Shaw Inherit the Wind: Jerome Lawrence, A Raisin in the Sun: Lorraine Hansberry Our Town: Thornton Wilder The Miracle Worker: William Gibson The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail: J. Lawrence and R. E. Lee Doctor Faustus: Marlowe, Christopher African American Literature A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: Frederick Douglas Up From Slavery: Booker T. Washington I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Maya Angelo Their Eyes were Watching God: Zora Neale Hurston Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison Black Boy: Richard Wright Go Tell it on the Mountain: James Baldwin Beloved: Tony Morrison The Color Purple: Alice Walker Native American Literature The Lone Ranger and Tonto and Fistfight in Heaven: Sherman Alexie The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian: Sherman Alexie When Legends Die: Hall Borland Blue Horses Rush In: Poems and Stories: Luci Tapahonso Waterlily: Ella Cara Deloria Citizens Creek: Lalita Tademy Night Flying Woman: An Ojibway Narrative: Ignatia Broker |
Additional Book Lists
Additional lists available:
Commentaries, analysis and study guides for novels are available at: Novel Analysis Questions The year 1 and 2 guide is generally used in 9th and 10th grade, but is sometimes used for advanced middle school students. Students who have not worked on novel analysis before 10th or 11th grade might use the year 1 and 2 questions for the first year and the year 3 and 4 questions following. The year 3 and 4 questions are typically used in 11th and 12th grade. Downloadable Documents:
The Importance of Literature
Relevance: "Genuine relevance in literature, on the contrary, is relatedness to what Eliot described as "the permanent things": to the splendor and tragedy of the human condition, to constant moral insights, to the spectacle of human history, to love of community and country, to the achievements of right reason." Russell Kirk CERC Depth and Active Thinking Literature should be "selected for its depth and for the way it transcends the obvious and the cliché....to promote this kind of thought actively, by teaching students how to analyze what they read, understand others’ opinions about the text, and formulate their own views....calculated to wake the imagination and challenge the reason." Russell Kirk CERC Self-awareness "If young people are to begin to understand themselves, and to understand other people, and to know the laws which govern our nature, they ought to be encouraged to read allegory, fable, myth, and parable. All things begin and end in mystery. Out of tales of wonder comes awe — and the beginnings of philosophy....rousing the moral imagination is narrative history and biography (including autobiography)." Russell Kirk CERC Broadened perspectives "Reading of great lives does something to form decent lives.....Fiction is truer than fact: I mean that in great fiction we obtain the distilled judgments of writers of remarkable perceptions — views of human nature and society which we could get, if unaided by books, only at the end of life, if then.....'Scientific' truth, or what is popularly taken for scientific truth, alters from year to year — with accelerating speed in our time. But poetic and moral truths change little with the elapse of centuries; and the norms of politics are fairly constant....The purpose of literature is not simple amusement, nor sullen negation, but rather the guarding and advancement of the permanent things, through the power of the word. " Russell Kirk CERC |