Book List
The following books summaries have been copied from book dust covers and from the internet. In addition to the major works listed, students with be reading many short stories and poems.
I encourage you to read along or discuss your student’s reading with her or him.
I encourage you to read along or discuss your student’s reading with her or him.
The 6 Most Important Decisions You'll Ever Make gives great insight to
teenagers who are facing hardships. Sean Covey believes there are 6 important
decisions that you will make in your life. They are decisions about school,
parents, friends, dating and sex, addictions, and self-worth. Each section goes
into great detail to explain each area. Throughout the book, there are hilarious
cartoons, graphics, famous quotes, and thoughts from other teens. Sean Covey did not just use his ideas and opinions. The book is filled with statistics, experimental studies, and professional reports which show that it is a quality
book. The book never seemed offensive, and would not turn away teenagers who are facing problems that are talked about in the book. Each section had multiple
stories, positive and negative, about teenagers and how they have dealt with the
6 decisions in their lives. It really makes the decisions seem real and makes you think about how you have made those decisions in your life.
teenagers who are facing hardships. Sean Covey believes there are 6 important
decisions that you will make in your life. They are decisions about school,
parents, friends, dating and sex, addictions, and self-worth. Each section goes
into great detail to explain each area. Throughout the book, there are hilarious
cartoons, graphics, famous quotes, and thoughts from other teens. Sean Covey did not just use his ideas and opinions. The book is filled with statistics, experimental studies, and professional reports which show that it is a quality
book. The book never seemed offensive, and would not turn away teenagers who are facing problems that are talked about in the book. Each section had multiple
stories, positive and negative, about teenagers and how they have dealt with the
6 decisions in their lives. It really makes the decisions seem real and makes you think about how you have made those decisions in your life.
Animal Farm In this satire of the Russian Revolution, Mr. Jones's Manor Farm is transformed into Animal Farm, a democratic society proclaiming All Animals Are Created Equal. After totalitarian rule is re-established, the reality becomes But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others.
Antigone After King Oedipus was exiled from the city of Thebes when he learned that he had committed incest and patricide, his younger son Eteocles claimed that the kingship belonged to him, exiling his older brother Polyneices. Polyneices then attacked Thebes with a massive army, but neither son won because they killed each other in battle. The new Theban king, Creon, declares that Eteocles will be buried and honored as a hero while Polyneices' body will rot away and be eaten by dogs in disgrace; the penalty for trying to bury the body is death. Hearing this news, an angry Antigone insists that her brother's body must be buried so that his spirit can rest in peace.
Brave New World "Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today
The Canterbury Tales, a collection of narratives a frame story, written between 1387 and 1400, tells of a group of thirty people from all layers of society who pass the time along their pilgrimage to Canterbury by telling stories to one another, their interaction mediated (at times) by the affable Host Chaucer himself. The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath, and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe, the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of "The Canterbury Tales."
Lord of the Flies Few works in literature have received as much popular and critical attention as Nobel Laureate William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Since its publication in 1954, it has amassed a cult following, and has significantly contributed to our dystopian vision of the post-war era. When responding to the novel's dazzling power of intellectual insight, scholars and critics often invoke the works of Shakespeare, Freud, Rousseau, Sartre, Orwell, and Conrad.
"Macbeth" No dramatist has ever seen with more frightening clarity into the heart and mind of a murderer than has Shakespeare in this compelling tragedy of evil. Taunted into asserting his "masculinity" by his ambitious wife, Macbeth chooses to embrace the Weird Sisters' prophecy and kill his king--and thus, seals his own doom. Fast-moving and bloody, this drama has the extraordinary energy that derives from a brilliant plot replete with treachery and murder, and from Shakespeare's compelling portrait of the ultimate battle between a mind and its own guilt.
"A Midsummer Night’s Dream" Magic, love spells, and an enchanted wood provide the materials for one of Shakespeare's most delightful comedies. When four young lovers, fleeing the Athenian law and their own mismatched rivalries, take to the forest of Athens, their lives become entangled with a feud between the King and Queen of the Fairies. Some Athenian tradesmen, rehearsing a play for the forthcoming wedding of Duke Theseus and his bride, Hippolyta, unintentionally add to the hilarity. The result is a marvelous mix-up of desire and enchantment, merriment and farce, all touched by Shakespeare's inimitable vision of the intriguing relationship between art and life, dreams and the waking world.
"Othello" Though this great tragedy of unsurpassed intensity and emotion is played out against Renaissance splendor, its story of the doomed marriage of a Venetian senator's daughter, Desdemona, to a Moorish general, Othello, is especially relevant to modern audiences. The differences in race and background create an initial tension that allows the horrifyingly envious villain Iago methodically to promote the "green-eyed monster" jealousy, until, in one of the most deeply moving scenes in theatrical history, the noble Moor destroys the woman he loves--only to discover too late that she was innocent.
The Mummy Congress When acclaimed science journalist Heather Pringle was dispatched to a remote part of northern Chile to cover a little-known scientific conference, she found herself in the midst of the most passionate gathering of her working life—dozens of mummy experts lodge in a rambling seaside hotel, battling over the implications of their latest discoveries. Infected with their mania, Pringle spent the next year circling the globe, stopping in to visit the leading scientists so she could see firsthand the breathtaking delicacy and unexpected importance of their work.
Night is Elie Wiesel’ s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’ s original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man’s capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
"Pygmalion" Based on classical myth, Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion plays on the complex business of human relationships in a social world. Phonetics Professor Henry Higgins tutors the very Cockney Eliza Doolittle, not only in the refinement of speech, but also in the refinement of her manner. When the end result produces a very ladylike Miss Doolittle, the lessons learned become much more far reaching. The successful musical My Fair Lady was based on this Bernard Shaw classic.
Sophie’s World One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: Who are you? and Where does the world come from? From that strange— but irresistible— beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with these and other questions that explore matters both small and large, some that take her mind far beyond what she knows of her family and life in her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving a separate batch of equally unusual letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up in Sophie’s world? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must make use of the philosophy she is learning— but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined. A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, "Sophie's World" has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, having been translated into forty-five languages and with over twenty million copies in print.
The Year 1000 is a vivid and surprising portrait of life in England a thousand years ago—a world that already knew brain surgeons and property developers and, yes, even the occasional gossip columnist. Uncovering such wonderfully unexpected details, the authors bring this distant world closer than it has ever been before. How did people survive without sugar? How did monks communicate if they were not allowed to speak? Their research takes us back in time to a charming and very human world of kings and revelers, saints and slave laborers.