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Mr. Steele - English 12 Honors Summer Reading: Home

Summer Reading - English 12H

Summer reading—English 12 Honors addendum

Mr. Steele’s suggestions:

  1. You should consider not reading the following specific works, as we may be reading some of them next year (although there is certainly nothing wrong with re-reading a great book):
  1. Shakespeare’s King Lear or Macbeth or Hamlet
  2. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  3. E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View
  4. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
  5. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Dubliners
  6. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
  7. George Orwell’s 1984

  1. A good plan would be to read any other books by these same authors (or, in Emily Bronte’s case, her sisters Charlotte and Anne) that are not listed above. You would obtain a good feel for the style of their writing.

  1. Other authors that you might enjoy (even if some of them are not British):
  1. Leo Tolstoy
  2. Fyodor Dostoevsky
  3. Henry James
  4. Joseph Conrad
  5. Virginia Woolf
  6. Alexandre Dumas
  7. Toni Morrison
  8. Jules Verne
  9. Robert Louis Stevenson
  10. Sir Walter Scott
  11. James Baldwin
  12. Oscar Wilde
  13. August Wilson
  14. Samuel Beckett
  15. Tennessee Williams
  16. William Faulkner
  17. Chinua Achebe
  18. Derek Walcott

Above all, pick two works that you find challenging. The above lists are only suggestions; there are many great contemporary authors out there . Whatever you read, you should certainly write some journal entries about the books, because your first grade of the next school year will be some kind of response to them (not plot summaries).

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