 High School District 219 |
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Summer Reading 2012
Look below and find your grade level for next year. Look at the interesting choice(s) and read
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INCOMING FRESHMAN CHOICES (choose one) | ||
 | Rules of the Road Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| Jenna Boller, the star employee at Gladstone's Shoe Store in Chicago, is a very tall sixteen-year-old who really stands out in a crowd, but when Madeline Gladstone hires Jenna to drive her cross country to save her business, she learns the rules of the road, as well as the rules of life. (Novelist) |
 | Twisted Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl. But when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts. (Novelist) |
NEXT YEAR'S SOPHOMORES (choose one) | ||
 | The Glass Castle Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. (Novelist) |
| NEXT YEAR'S SOPHOMORE S19 (Combined Reading / English) & SOPHOMORE BASIC | ||
| The Glass Castle Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection Author Comments (video) | The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities. (Novelist) |
 | Catching Fire (Hunger Games Series #2) by Suzanne Collins Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| By winning the annual Hunger Games, District
12 tributes Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark have secured a life of
safety and plenty for themselves and their families, but because they
won by defying the rules, they unwittingly become the faces of an
impending rebellion. (Novelist) |
NEXT YEAR'S JUNIOR CHOICES (choose one) | ||
 | Eagle Blue by Michael D'Orso Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| A portrait of the basketball culture of Fort Yukon, Alaska, describes
the community's devotion to their championship high-school basketball
team and follows the lives of the fourteen team members, their families,
and their coach. (Novelist) |
 | Enrique's Journey by Sonia Nazario Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| When Enrique was five, his mother, too poor to feed her children, left
Honduras to work in the United States. The move allowed her to send
money back home so Enrique could eat better and go to school past the
third grade. She promised she would return quickly, but she struggled in
America. Without her, he became lonely and troubled. After eleven
years, he decided he would go find her. He set off alone, with little
more than a slip of paper bearing his mother's North Carolina telephone
number. Without money, he made the dangerous trek up the length of
Mexico, clinging to the sides and tops of freight trains. He and other
migrants, many of them children, are hunted like animals. To evade
bandits and authorities, they must jump onto and off the moving boxcars
they call the Train of Death. It is an epic journey, one thousands of
children make each year to find their mothers in the United States. (Novelist) |
 | The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists
know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her
cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. (Novelist) |
 | Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda. (Novelist) |
NEXT YEAR'S SENIOR CHOICES (choose one) | ||
 | A Thousand Splendid Suns Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| Two women born a generation apart witness the destruction of their home and family in wartorn Kabul. The losses incurred over the course of thirty years test the limits of their strength and courage. (Novelist) |
 | A Long Way Gone : Memoirs of a Boy Soldier Non-Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| In a heart-wrenching, candid autobiography, a human rights activist offers a firsthand account of war from the perspective of a former child soldier, detailing the violent civil war that wracked his native Sierra Leone and the government forces that transformed a gentle young boy into a killer as a member of the army. (Novelist) |
 |
(AP English Only / Required) Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| At its appearance in 1952, Invisible Man was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. A work both epic and richly comic, it won the National Book Award for its author, Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man has been translated into fourteen languages and has never been out of print .…Written in the style of a bildungsroman, or novel of education, the book chronicles the sometimes absurd adventures of a young black man whose successful search for identity ends with the realization that he is invisible …. [Dealing] with themes of individuality, identity, history, and responsibility, the protagonist is repeatedly exhorted to look beneath the surface of things. Although Ellison freely acknowledged his debt to both European and African American literary traditions, he used an astonishing range of African-American folk forms in constructing his protagonist's universe. Critics agree that the influence of Invisible Man on American literature in general, and its role in bringing the blues and folklore into the mainstream of black experience in particular, is incalculable. (eNotes.com) |
AIM Classes Only - Mrs. Schultz | ||
 | Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment Science - Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| After the mutant Erasers abduct the youngest member of their group, the "birdkids," who are the result of genetic experimentation, take off in pursuit and find themselves struggling to understand their own origins and purpose. (Novelist) |
| Twisted Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl. But when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts. (Novelist) |
 | 24 Girls in 7 Days | Jack Grammar, average American senior, has no date for the prom until his so-called best friends post an ad in the school newspaper and assemble a list of eager girls, giving him just seven days to meet and date them all before asking one special girl to the prom. (Novelist) |
| Rules of the Road Fiction Click Here to Read a Selection
| Jenna Boller, the star employee at Gladstone's Shoe Store in Chicago, is a very tall sixteen-year-old who really stands out in a crowd, but when Madeline Gladstone hires Jenna to drive her cross country to save her business, she learns the rules of the road, as well as the rules of life. (Novelist) |