AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16 THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN
THE AENEID Virgil
Alexie, Sherman
Virgil's epic poem describing the fall of Troy and the legendary origin of Rome in English prose.
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Native American is the school mascot.
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE Wharton, Edith
AHAB’S WIFE Naslund, Sena Jeter
A portrayal of New York society in the 1870s where money counted for less than manners and morals.
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Remarque, Erich Maria
Depicts the experiences of a group of young German soldiers fighting and suffering during the last days of World War I.
A companion to Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," in which Una Spenser tells the story of her life, and discusses her loving marriage to Captain Ahab before the white whale took his leg and drove him into madness.
ALL BUT MY LIFE Klein, Gerda Weissman
The author tells of the three years she endured as a slave laborer of the Nazis during World War II.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
ALL THE KING’S MEN
THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY
Warren, Robert Penn
Chabon, Michael
Willie Stark, a wellintentioned idealistic backcountry lawyer is unable to resist greed for power and lust for politics during his rise and fall as an American demagogue.
AMERICAN PASTORAL
Joe Kavalier has managed to escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and now he must use his cunning wits to help rescue his family from Hitler's evil plans.
ANGLE OF REPOSE
Roth, Phillip
Seymour "Swede" Levov, a hard working man who came of age in triumphant postwar America, must give up his dreams of a peaceful life when his daughter grows up to be a 1960s revolutionary terrorist.
ANIMAL DREAMS Kingsolver, Barbara
Stegner, Wallace Earle
Story of four generations in the life of the Ward family, from America's western frontier to today.
ANNA KARENINA Tolstoy, Leo
Codi returns to her hometown to confront her past and face her ailing father. What she finds is a town threatened by an environmental catastrophe and a man who could change her life.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X X, Malcolm
In nineteenth-century Russia, the wife of an important government official loses her family and social status when she chooses the love of Count Vronsky over a passionless marriage.
THE AWAKENING Chopin, Kate
The personal story of the man who rose from hoodlum, thief, dope peddler, and pimp to become a leader of the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
Edna Pontellier, a Victorian-era wife and mother, is awakened to the full force of her desire for love and freedom when she becomes enamored with Robert LeBrun, a young man she meets while on vacation.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
BEE SEASON
BELOVED
Goldberg, Myla
Morrison, Toni
Eliza Naumann is used to being the unremarkable member of her family, but when she wins a series of spelling bees, her once distant family begins to lavish praise on her, bringing about surprising complications.
Sethe, an escaped slave who now lives in post-Civil War Ohio, has borne the unthinkable and works hard at "beating back the past." She struggles to keep Beloved, an intruder, from gaining possession of her present while throwing off the legacy of her past.
BLACK HAWK DOWN
BILLY BUDD Melville, Herman
Bowden, Mark
Narrates the hatred of petty officer Claggart for Billy, a handsome Spanish sailor. Billy strikes and kills Claggart, and is condemned by Captain Vere even though the latter senses Billy's spiritual innocence.
Chronicles the experiences of ninety-nine American soldiers who were trapped in the city of Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993.
BLEAK HOUSE
BLESS ME ULTIMA
Dickens, Charles
Anaya, Rodulfo
Presents Dickens's 1853 novel which tells the story of several generations of the Jarndyce family who wait in vain to inherit money that is tied up in a legal dispute in England's notoriously slow moving Court of Chancery.
Six-year-old Antonio embarks upon a spiritual journey under the watchful guidance of Ultima, a healing woman, that leads him to question his faith and beliefs in family, religion, and other aspects of his Chicano culture.
THE BLUEST EYE
THE BODY OF CHRISTOPHER CREED
Morrison, Toni
Plum Ucci, Carol
An eleven-year-old AfricanAmerican girl in Ohio, in the early 1940s, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be beautiful.
Sixteen-year-old Torey Adams embarks on a path of terror and pain when he sets out to investigate the disappearance of Christopher Creed, a weird kid who vanished from his small hometown of Steepleton, leaving only a cryptic E-mail message as a possible clue to what happened to him.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
BONESETTER’S DAUGHTER
THE BOOK OF SALADIN Ali, Tariq
Tan, Amy
Ruth Young finally begins to understand her Alzheimer's-afflicted mother LuLing's preoccupation with ghosts and curses when she reads Luling's writings of her dark backwoods childhood in 1920s China-where LuLing's mute, disfigured nursemaid committed suicide, and a nearby cave held what may have been the bones of the lost ancient hominid Peking Man.
THE BOOK THIEF
A fictional memoir of Saladin, the Kurdish liberator of Jerusalem, as dictated to a Jewish scribe.
THE BOYS IN THE BOAT
Zusack, Mark
Brown, Daniel James
Tells how in 1936 the University of Washington's eight-oar crew, composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers who had mastered collegiate rowing, went on to the Berlin Olympics where they defeated Adolf Hitler's German team to achieve the Olympic gold medal.
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
BRAVE NEW WORLD Huxley, Aldous
BREATHE, EYES, MEMORY Danticat, Edwidge
A satirical novel about the utopia of the future, a world in which babies are decanted from bottles and the great Ford is worshipped.
BREATHING LESSONS Tyler, Anne
Sophie Caco, a child who was born of rape, leaves Haiti at the age of twelve to join her mother in New York City, where they both battle with the results of sexual abuse.
THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO Diaz, Junot
While driving to the funeral of a friend, a couple married twenty-eight years examine the expectations and disappointments of their marriage.
Overweight and nerdy Oscar lives with his Dominican American mother and sister in New Jersey and dreams of becoming a renowned author and finding true love, but unfortunately, a family curse stands in the way of his wishes. 4
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
CANDIDE Voltaire
The story of the lives of three sons of an old drunkard are used to depict Russian character and investigate the concepts of good, evil, and faith.
CARAMELO
Presents the eighteenthcentury social satire of a gentle and kind man who is thrashed by fate and his fellow man yet continues to believe that he lives in "the best of all possible worlds."
CATCH-22
Cisneros, Sandra
Heller, Joseph
Celaya "Lala" Reyes, traveling from Chicago to Mexico City each summer, draws together stories of her MexicanAmerican family of shawl-makers, including her papa and Awful Grandmother.
CATCHER IN THE RYE Salinger, J.D.
Presents a classic edition of the 1961 satire of military bureaucracy, focusing on the story of John Yossarian, a bombadier in World War II who is trying to avoid getting killed while at the same time dealing with a colonel who keeps upping the number of missions he must fly.
CAT’S CRADLE Vonnegut, Kurt
An adolescent boy, knowing he is about to be dropped by his school, spends three days and nights in New York City.
CAT’S EYE
In the year 2000, a young man discovers ice-nine, which can set off a chain reaction more deadly than a nuclear bomb, and a new prophet whose teachings sweep the world.
CEREMONY
Atwood, Margaret
Silko, Leslie Marmon
A feminist painter returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her work and confronts her memories, family, and friends.
Follows Tayo, a young Native American, after his release from a veteran's hospital following World War II as he searches for meaning and sanity in his life.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE CHERRY ORCHARD Checkov, Anton
COLD MOUNTAIN Frasier, Charles
Chekhov's last play, written in 1904, tells the story of an aristocratic Russian family that struggles to maintain their status in a changing world as they are faced with the prospect of selling the family estate to a land developer in order to pay off their debts.
COLOR OF WATER: A BLACK MAN’S TRIBUTE TO HIS WHITE MOTHER McBride, James
Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier, leaves the hospital where he is being treated and determines to walk home to his sweetheart Ada, only to find the land and the girl he remembers as changed by the war as he.
THE COLOR PURPLE Walker, Alice
An African-American male tells of his mother, a white woman, who refused to admit her true identity.
COLUMBINE Cullen, David
Tells the story of two AfricanAmerican sisters: Nettie, a missionary in Africa, and Celie, a child-wife living in the south, in the medium of their letters to each other and in Celie's case, the desperate letters she begins, "Dear God."
A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES Toole, John Kennedy
Provides an account of the shootings at Colorado's Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, focusing on the teenage killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, drawing from interviews, police files, psychological studies, and writings and tapes by the boys to look at the signs they left that disaster was looming.
CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER Styron, William
Tells the story of the shortlived, bloody rebellion of slaves in Southhampton, Virginia, in August, 1831, as seen through the eyes of the instigator, Nat Turner.
Pulitzer Prize winning farce, set in New Orleans, telling about Ignatius J. Reilly and his various attempts at employment and one-man wars.
COPPER SUN Draper, Sharon
Two fifteen-year-old girls-one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves 6
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
CORELLI’S MANDOLIN DeBernieres, Louis
THE CRUCIBLE Miller, Arthur
Life changes on the Greek island of Cephalonia as Axis forces invade during World War II, and beautiful Pelagia finds that she must choose between Mandras, a fisherman who joins the resistance and Corelli, a captain with the communist Italian troops.
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY Paton, Alan
Presents Arthur Miller's play in which a vengeful teenager in 1692 Salem accuses her former lover and his wife of witchcraft. Includes an introduction.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME Haddon, Mark
Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo travels to Johannesburg on an errand for a friend and to visit his son, Absalom, only to learn Absalom has been accused of murdering white city engineer and social activist Arthur Jarvis and stands very little chance of receiving mercy.
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
DAISY MILLER
DAVID COPPERFIELD
James, Henry
Dickens, Charles
Daisy Miller, an innocent yet bold American girl, runs afoul of the European code of conduct at the turn of the twentieth century.
THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY Larson, Erik
Tells the parallel stories of Daniel Burnham, the main architect of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, and serial killer Henry H. Holmes, discussing the challenges Burnham faced in creating the hugely successful White City, and looking at how Holmes used the opportunities afforded by the fair to lure victims to their deaths.
A young boy in nineteenthcentury London runs away from an unhappy home, finds employment in a wine factory, and becomes acquainted with a wide variety of characters in the city streets.
A DOLL’S HOUSE Ibsen, Henrik
Presents Ibsen's 1879 play in which Nora, stifled as a pampered wife, forges a signature to obtain money for her ailing husband, resulting in her personal growth and increased resentment of being treated like a doll in her own home. 7
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
DON QUIOXOTE
EAST OF EDEN
Cervantes, Miguel de
Steinbeck, John
An abridged version of Miguel de Cervantes's classic story of a Spanish country gentleman and his friend who set out to right wrongs and punish evil.
The saga of three generations of the Trask and Hamilton families in the early 1900s in Northern California.
EQUUS
EMPIRE FALLS
Shaffer, Peter
Russo, Richard
Miles Roby, called back from college to the small town of Empire Falls in Dexter County, Maine to take care of his ailing mother, falls into a rut that keeps him trapped until years later when a series of revelations and tragedies jolts him back into an awareness of his life.
THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG Mailer, Norman
A psychiatrist's probings into the mind of a young man who has blinded six horses with a spike, leaves him questioning his own purpose and the work he is doing.
A FAREWELL TO ARMS Hemingway, Ernest
The story of convicted murderer Gary Mark Gilmore, who made news in the 20th Century when he demanded the death penalty rather then spending his life in jail.
FAT KID RULES THE WORLD Going, K.L.
An American ambulance officer serving on the AustroItalian front deserts to join an English nurse after the retreat of Caporetto.
FAST FOOD NATION Schlosser, Eric
Seventeen-year-old Troy, depressed, suicidal, and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, gets a new perspective on life when Curt, a semi-homeless teen who is a genius on guitar, asks Troy to be the drummer in a rock band.
Traces the history of the fast food industry and discusses how it arose in postwar America.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
FEED
FENCES
Anderson, M.T.
Wilson, August
This satire is set in a future world where television and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies. The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly entertainment-and by constant customized murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.
THE FIXER
Troy Maxson, a strong, hard man who has learned how to be Black and proud in the 1950s, finds the changing spirit of the 1960s hard to deal with.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS Lurie, Alison
Malamud, Bernard
Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman, is accused of the murder of a young Russian boy and refuses to confess to a crime he did not commit in spite of the injustices committed against him.
FREEWILL
Set mostly in London, it is the story of two American professors of English from an Ivy League university who spend several months in the capital city of England.
FRANKENSTEIN
Lynch, Chris
Shelley, Mary
A teenager trying to recover from the tragic death of his father and stepmother believes himself to be responsible for the rash of teen suicides occurring in his town.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS Bissinger, H.G.
Victor Frankenstein has discovered the secret of generating life from lifeless matter, and has created a monster being by using this terrible power.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANTS WIFE Fowles, John
Follows the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, exploring the lives of the players and the impact of the championship team on the small town.
Charles Smithson, a nineteenth-century English gentleman of traditional values, is engaged to a wealthy, proper young woman but finds himself haunted by the independent and destitute Sarah Woodruff. 9
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
GILEAD
THE GLASS CASTLE
Robinson, Marilynne
Walls, Jeannette
In 1956, toward the end of his life, Reverend John Ames begins a letter to his young son, sharing the story of his life and explaining how his faith influenced his choices and actions.
The author recalls her life growing up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father and distant mother and describes how she and her siblings had to fend for themselves until they finally found the resources and will to leave home.
THE GLASS MENAGERIE Williams, Tennesee
GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Baldwin, James
Describes a day in the life of several members of a Harlem fundamentalist church. The saga of three generations of people is related through flashbacks.
Amanda, a faded southern belle, abandoned wife, and dominating mother, hopes to match her daughter Laura with an eligible "gentleman caller" while her son Tom supports the family. Laura, lame and painfully shy, evades her mother's schemes and reality by retreating to the makebelieve world of her glass animal collection. Tom eventually leaves home to become a writer but is forever haunted by the memory of Laura.
GOING AFTER CACCIATO O’Brien, Tim
An American soldier in Vietnam decides to leave the war and simply walks out of the jungle, with the intent of going to Paris.
THE GOOD EARTH
THE GOLDEN COMPASS Pullman, Phillip
Accompanied by her daemon, Lyra Belacqua sets out to prevent her best friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of gruesome experiments in the Far North.
A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN
Buck, Pearl S.
Butler, Robert Olen
The story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land during famine, drought, and revolution.
Seventeen short stories blending Vietnamese folklore with American realities as Vietnamese refugees try to balance their traditions with American popular culture.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE GRAPES OF WRATH Steinbeck, John
A GREAT AND TERRIBLE BEAUTY Bray, Libba
The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.
GRIFFIN AND SABINE Bantock, Nick
After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteenyear-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world.
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS Swift, Jonathan
The voyages of an Englishman carry him to a land of people six inches high, a land of giants, an island of sorcerers, and a land where horses are masters of human-like creatures.
Lonely London postcard designer Griffin Moss develops an increasingly intimate correspondence with Sabine Strohem, a stamp illustrator on a South Pacific island, after she writes to compliment him on one of his creations and eventually confesses she shares a psychic connection with him.
GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS Updike, John
THE HANDMAID’S TALE Atwood, Margaret
A fictional re-creation of the lives of Claudius and Gertrude, King and Queen of Denmark, in the years before the action of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" begins.
HARD TIMES
Set in the near future, America has become a puritanical theocracy and Offred tells her story as a Handmaid under the new social order.
HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN
Dickens, Charles
Cross, Charles
In a northern English town, disciplinarian Thomas Gradgrind must reexamine his utilitarian worldview when his daughter's upbringing and loveless marriage lead her to a crisis.
Chronicles the troubled, creative life of rock singersongwriter Kurt Cobain, who rose to fame in the early 1990s as the lead singer of Nirvana and shot himself in 1994, and describes the aftermath of his death for his wife, daughter, parents, friends, and fans. 11
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE HELP
THE HIGHEST TIDE
Stockett, Kathryn
Lynch, Jim
Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the AfricanAmerican women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.
HOLE IN MY LIFE Gantos, Jack
When thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley discovers a rare deepsea creature stranded in the mud of the tidal flats of Puget Sound, he finds himself thrown into the limelight, but when he continues discovering rare ocean creatures, some begin to wonder if he is an unlikely prophet.
THE HOURS Cunningham, Michael
Two women with very different lives are joined together at a party for an ailing poet, and together they realize that even though their lives are different, they are tied together by a common bond.
The author relates how, as a young adult, he became a drug user and smuggler, was arrested, did time in prison, and eventually got out and went to college, all the while hoping to become a writer.
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
THE HOUSE OF SCORPION
Wharton, Edith
Farmer, Nancy
Lily Bart is an upper-class miss in New York at the turn of the century. She can't quite bring herself to be a poor, marriageable girl, so she repeatedly fumbles her opportunities for a "good" marriage.
In a future where humans despise clones, Matt enjoys special status as the young clone of El Patron, the 142year-old leader of a corrupt drug empire nestled between Mexico and the United States.
THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES Hawethorne, Nathaniel
Follows the Pyncheon family who lived for generations under a dead man's curse until his death restored their house.
HOW I LIVE NOW Rosoff, Meg
To get away from her pregnant stepmother in New York City, fifteen-year-old Daisy goes to England to stay with her aunt and cousins, with whom she instantly bonds, but soon war breaks out and rips apart the family while devastating the land. 12
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
HUMBOLDT’S GIFT Bellow, Saul
IN COLD BLOOD Capote, Truman
Charlie Citrine has failed to live up to his potential, until Humboldt's gift arrives, a mocking gift from the grave that sends Charlie groping towards redemption.
An account of the murders of the four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, in 1959 by two drifters who fled to Mexico and were later arrested and executed for their crimes.
IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES Alvarez, Julia
Gives a fictionalized account of four sisters in the Dominican Republic under the dictatorship of General Trujillo. The four sisters were brave enough to join the resistance and fight against him until the end. The Mirabal sisters stood strong and fought for their freedom until the last breath.
INDEPENDENCE DAY Ford, Richard
Sequel to: The Sportswriter. Frank Bascombe, having lost his career and his family, is selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and is settling for a life of mere existence until the events of one Fourth of July weekend shock him into real contact with life.
INTO THIN AIR Krakauer, Jon
The author relates his experience of climbing Mount Everest during its deadliest season and examines what it is about the mountain that makes people willingly subject themselves to such risk, hardship, and expense.
INTERPRETER OF MALADIES Lahiri, Jhumpa
A young girl living in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago ponders the advantages and disadvantages of her environment and evaluates her relationships with family and friends.
INTO THE WILD Krakauer, Jon
Tells the story of Chris McCandless, a twenty-fouryear-old who walked into the Alaskan wilderness on an idealistic journey and was found dead of starvation four months later. Attempts to discover what led the young man to that point. 13
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE INVISIBLE MAN Ellison, Ralph
IRONWEED Kennedy, William
In the course of his wanderings from a Southern college to New York's Harlem, an African America man becomes involved in a series of adventures.
JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN
The author relates how, as a young adult, he became a drug user and smuggler, was arrested, did time in prison, and eventually got out and went to college, all the while hoping to become a writer.
THE JOY LUCK CLUB Tan, Amy
Trumbo, Dalton
A young man who was severely wounded in World War I thinks about his life and about the horror and futility of war.
The personal, often painful, histories of four Chinese American women who began meeting in San Francisco in 1949 to play mah jong are revealed as the daughter of one who has died searches for her sisters in China to tell them about the mother they never knew.
THE KILLER ANGELS
KING DORK Portman, Frank
Shaara, Michael
High school loser Tom Henderson discovers that "The Catcher in the Rye" may hold the clues to the many mysteries in his life.
A fictional account of four days in July, 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg discussing tactics, plans, and preparations for battle from both the Northern and Southern points of view.
KING LEAR Shakespeare, William
Presents original and modern English versions of "King Lear," Shakespeare's drama about an aging regent who foolishly disinherits his favorite daughter and splits his kingdom between his other two daughters who are secretly plotting against him.
THE KITE RUNNER Hosseini, Khaled
Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE KNOWN WORLD Jones, Edward P.
A LESSON BEFORE DYING Gaines, Ernest
In antebellum Virginia, young slave Henry Townsend stays with his powerful white owner after his parents buy his freedom, soon becoming a slave owner himself, but when he dies in his thirties, his worst fears come true as his widow, Caldonia, takes over the plantation and it slips into chaos.
THE LIFE ALL AROUND ME
Tells the story of a young African-American man sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, and a teacher who tries to impart to him his learning and pride before the execution.
THE LIFE OF PI
Gibbons, Kaye
Martel, Yann
Fifteen-year-old Ellen Foster is finally settled into a permanent home with a new mother and tries to prepare for her future while still carrying the burden of her mother's death and father's abuse.
Pi Patel, having spent an idyllic childhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper, sets off with his family at the age of sixteen to start anew in Canada, but his life takes a marvelous turn when their ship sinks in the Pacific, leaving him adrift on a raft with a 450pound Bengal tiger for company.
LITTLE FOXES
LITTLE PRINCES: ONE MAN’S PROMISE TO BRING HOME THE LOST CHILDREN OF NEPAL
Hellman, Lillian
An acting edition of the 1939 drama in which brothers Oscar and Ben Hubbard steal money from their ailing brother-in-law in order to fund a cotton mill, only to be caught by their sister Regina who demands they give her a seventy-five percent share of the business in exchange for keeping them out of prison.
Conor, Grennan
Grennan Conor, a young man who left his job to travel the world, describes his experiences at the orphanage in Nepal that inspired him to vow to set up another orphanage and find the abandoned children's parents, who were tricked by a man they paid to take the children to somewhere they could have a better life, safe from being kidnapped and forced to work in the rebel army.
LONESOME DOVE McMurtry, Larry
Two former Texas Rangers, Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call, leave their Texas ranch to lead a cattle drive to Montana, encountering outlaws, Native Americans, and ex-loves along the way. 15
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL Wolfe, Thomas
LOTTERY Wood, Patricia
After the death of his grandmother--the only family he ever knew--mentally disabled store clerk Perry Crandall wins the Washington State Lottery and suddenly he has more family than he ever imagined, but has trouble figuring out who he can trust.
Describes the coming of age of Eugene Gant, his boyhood in North Carolina and his growing passion to experience life.
LUCKY JIM
A MAP OF THE WORLD
Kingsley, Amis
Teaching assistant James Dixon, burdened with a stuffy boss and an unwanted and unstable girlfriend, finds himself in a difficult position when he falls for Christine, a woman brought home for the weekend by his boss's son.
MADAME BOVARY
Hamilton, Jane
From the author of the widely acclaimed The Book of Ruth comes a harrowing, heartbreaking drama about a rural American family and a disastrous event that forever changes their lives.
MARCH
Flaubert, Gustave
The wife of a provincial doctor seeks to escape her boredom by indulging in romantic fantasies and adulterous affairs in nineteenth-century France.
Brooks, Geraldine
Follows the experiences of Mr. March, the father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," as he witnesses the cruelty and racism of both Northern and Southern soldiers and the harsh realities of Civil War.
MAJOR BARBARA Shaw, George Bernard
A play about poverty and society, dramatized in the struggle between a wealthy man and his daughter, Barbara, who works with the Salvation Army.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS Fugard, Athol
MAYOR CASTERBRIDGE Hardy, Thomas
"Master Harold," or Hally, learns that his alcoholic father is to be released from the hospital and struggles with his emotions during a confrontation with the two black men who help in the family's restaurant in 1950s South Africa.
THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER Edwards, Kim
Michael Henchard, an unemployed farmhand, gets drunk and sells his wife and baby daughter, but nineteen years later, when he is the Mayor of Casterbridge, his past is brought back to haunt him, when they return, and his success is undone.
MIDDLESEX Eugenides, Jeffrey
Dr. David Henry, forced to deliver his own twins during a snowstorm in 1964 with only a nurse to help him, makes a decision that has farreaching effects on his life, and the lives of his wife and son, when his infant daughter is born with Down Syndrome, and in a vain attempt to protect his wife, he orders the nurse to take the baby to an institution.
THE MILL ON THE FLOSS Eliot, George
Three generations of a Greek American family find themselves plagued by a mutant gene which causes bizarre side effects in the family's teenage girls.
MIRAL Jebreal, Rula
Young Maggie Tulliver's loyalty to her beloved older brother, Tom, and to the rest of her family is fatally torn when she falls in love with the son of her father's bitterest enemy.
MOBY DICK Melville, Herman
Captain Ahab's determination to find and kill the great white whale becomes an obsession driving him to disaster.
After years of caring for the fiftyfive orphaned children who were victims of the violence that erupted in Jerusalem in 1948, Hind Husseini discovers that some of her grown students are beginning to participate in the violent conflict over Palestinian independence and Hind races to save Miral, one of her brightest students.
MOLL FLANDERS Defoe, Daniel
The fortunes and misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders. 1722. Moll Flanders, born in Newgate Prison, pursues a life of adventure that eventually leads her to a position of wealth and stature in bustling eighteenth-century London. 17
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE Hijuelos, Oscar
Cesar and Nestor, Cuban musicians, make their way from Havana to the New York stage in 1949 where they share triumphs and tragedies.
MARCH TOWARD THUNDER Bruchac, Joseph
Louis Nollette, a fifteen-yearold Abenaki Indian, joins the Irish Brigade in 1864 to fight for the Union in the Civil War.
THE MOTHER TONGUE: ENGLISH AND HOW IT GOT THAT WAY
MIDDLE PASSAGE Johnson, Charles
In 1830, Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave leading a dissolute life in New Orleans, finds himself forced into marriage.
MY ANTONIA
Bryson, Bill
Covers the history of language from its beginnings to the explosion of English as a global language in the twentieth century.
MY FORBIDDEN FACE: GROWING UP UNDER THE TALIBAN Latifa
Cather, Willa
A successful lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with an immigrant Bohemian girl.
Latifa, a young woman who was sixteen in 1996 when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, tells about her family's experiences under the repressive regime, focusing on the lives of women and girls who were abruptly denied the freedom to work, go to school, or even leave their homes without a male escort.
NATIVE SON
THE NAMESAKE
Wright, Richard
Lahiri, Jhumpa
A young man born of Indian parents in America struggles with issues of identity from his teens to his thirties.
Trapped in the povertystricken ghetto of Chicago's South Side, a young AfricanAmerican man finds release only in acts of violence.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
NATIVE SPEAKER
NEVER LET ME GO
Lee, Chang Rae
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Henry Park is a Korean American private investigator who, in the course of spying on a New York City politician, comes to terms with his own sense of identity, family, and culture.
1984
Thirty-one-year-old Kathy, along with old friends from Hailsham, a private school in England, are forced to face the truth about their childhood when they all come together again.
NO-NO BOY
Orwell, George
Okada, John
Depicts life in a totalitarian regime of the future.
A NORTHERN LIGHT
After World War II Ichiro returns home to Seattle after four years--two spent in a Japanese internment camp, and two in prison for refusing to fight in the U.S. Army, and finds himself rejected by still-frightened whites, as well as his own people.
OBASAN Kogawa, Joy
Donnelly, Jennifer
Sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and boyfriend, takes a job at a hotel in 1906 where the death of a guest renews her determination to live her own life.
ON THE ROAD Kerouac, Jack
Presents a thinly fictionalized autobiography of Jack Kerouac's cross-country adventure across North America on a quest for selfknowledge as experienced by his alter-ego, Sal Paradise and Sal's friend Dean Moriarty (Kerouac's real life friend Neal Cassady).
Sequel: Itsuka. Naomi Nakane, a child of Japanese immigrant parents, is interned by the Canadians at the beginning of World War II when she is five years old.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE Marquez, Gabriel Garcia
The rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo as told through the history of the Buendia family.
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THE OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER Welty, Eudora
OUT OF AFRICA Dinesen, Isak
The author describes her life on a coffee plantation in Kenya for seventeen years before returning to Denmark in 1931 to write.
A woman who has left the South returns when her father is dying. After his death, she and her silly young stepmother go back to the small Mississippi town where she grew up.
PARABLE OF THE SOWER
O PIONEERS! Cather, Willa
Butler, Octavia
Alexandra, daughter of a Swedish immigrant farmer in Nebraska, inherits the family farm and finds love with an old friend.
PASSAGE TO INDIA Forster, E.M.
A classic account of the clash of cultures in British India after the turn of the century revealing the menace lurking just under the surface of ordinary misunderstanding.
PERSEPOLIS Satrapi, Marjane
Contains black-and-white comic strip images in which the author shares the story of her life in Tehran, Iran, where she lived from ages six to fourteen while the country came under control of the Islamic regime.
The odyssey of a sensitive young woman in a world that has become almost completely dehumanized. Set in California in the years 2024 through 2027.
THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER Chbosky, Stephen
Charlie, a freshman in high school, explores the dilemmas of growing up through a collection of letters he sends to an unknown receiver.
THE PLAGUE Camus, Albert
A coastal city in Algeria is struck by bubonic plague and is shut off from the world for months.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE POISONWOOD BIBLE Kingsolver, Barbara
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN Joyce, James
Nathan Price and his family move to the Belgian Congo in 1959, and the experiences they have while living in Africa affect each member of the family in a different way.
THE POWER OF ONE Courtenay, Bryce
An autobiographical novel depicting the childhood, adolescence, and early manhood of Stephen Dedalus.
THE POX PARTY Anderson, M.T.
Story of Peekay, an English boy, living in South Africa during World War II whose dream is to become a winner.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY James, Henry
A high-spirited American girl, Isabel Archer, arrives at the English manor Gardencourt, rouses the passions of several men, and finds herself in an unhappy marriage.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN Manchester, Simon
Explains how the "Oxford English Dictionary" was created and discusses the relationship between the editor and one of his most influential contributors, a psychotic murderer in one of England's cruelest asylums.
Various diaries, letters, and other manuscripts chronicle the experiences of Octavian, a young African American, from birth to age sixteen, as he is brought up as part of a science experiment in the years leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
PREP Sittenfeld, Curtis
Midwesterner Lee Fiora is sent by her father to a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts where she manages to survive in spite of the social differences between her and her classmates.
RABBIT IS RICH Updike, John
Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom's comfortable new prosperity is threatened by the return of his son, and reminders of a former romance.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
RAGTIME
A RAISIN IN THE SUN
Doctorow, E.L.
Hansberry, Lorraine
Three remarkable families lives' become entwined with Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Theodore Dreiser, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata at the turn of the century.
REBECCA
A three-act play concerned with the tensions in a middleclass African American family living on Chicago's Southside in the 1950s.
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
DuMaurier, Daphne
Crane, Stephen
The second Mrs. Maxim de Winter finds it difficult and frightening to live in the shadow of her predecessor, a situation that is exacerbated by her husband's moodiness, and the presence of sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers.
THE RED TENT
Presents a retelling of the classic story of a young Union soldier who must reconcile his conflicting emotions about war after coming under fire for the first time at the battle of Chancellorsville.
REMAINS OF THE DAY
Diamant, Anita
Ishiguro, Kazuo
The story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is told from her point of view, beginning with the story of her mothers, Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah. These wives of Jacob give her the gifts that are to sustain her through a damaged youth, a calling to midwifery, and a new home in a foreign land.
RESERVATION BLUES Alexie, Sherman
Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in 1931, and was murdered seven years later. He reappears in 1992 on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who starts Coyote Springs, an allIndian Catholic rock-androll band.
The life of Stevens, an aging English butler, changes after three decades of service to the same man.
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE Hardy, Thomas
Clym Yeobright, tired of Paris city life, returns to Egdon Heath to open a school. There he marries a pleasure-loving girl and tragedy follows.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE RIGHT STUFF
THE ROAD
Wolfe, Tom
McCarthy, Cormac
Discusses the lives, ambitions, thoughts, and feelings of the seven Project Mecury astronauts before, during, and after their historic space flights.
A nameless man and his young son wander through a decimated landscape, searching for means of survival and a reason for hope as barbaric hordes of people roam the streets and ash falls from the sky.
RABBIT, RUN
ROBINSON CRUSOE Defoe, Daniel
Updike, John
During one of his several adventurous voyages in the seventeenth century, an Englishman becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck and lives for nearly thirty years on a desert island.
SALT: A WORLD HISTORY Kurlansky, Mark
Chronicles the history of salt, discussing how it has shaped civilizations from the earliest beginnings of world history and how it has been used in different cultures.
SEIZE THE DAY
Twenty-six-year-old Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, unhappy with his life, deserts his pregnant wife and young son and becomes involved with another woman, but when his wife gives birth, he returns home, only to be met by tragedy.
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES Kidd, Sue Monk
Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared for Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find a safe haven in Tiburon, South Carolina, at the home of three beekeeping sisters.
THE SHADOW OF THE WIND
Bellow, Saul
Zafon, Carlos Ruiz
A novel about one day in the life of a middle-aged New Yorker struggling to make sense of his failures, atone for his sins, and understand how to truly "live in the moment."
In 1945 Spain, the young son of an antique-book dealer searches for more books by Julián Carax, an author he has recently discovered, and finds that everything Carax has ever written has been destroyed-and that his search has put his friends and family in danger. 23
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE SHIPPING NEWS Proulx, E. Anne
SHOPGIRL Martin, Steve
Mirabelle works as a shop assistant in the glove department at Neiman’s. She has two men in her life : Jeremy, a man who stencils amplifiers for a living; and Mr Roy Porter, a rich, older man who believes he can apply logic to relationships. How can she choose?
Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters return to the family ancestral home in Newfoundland to start new lives.
SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS
SONG OF SOLOMON
Guterson, David
Morrison, Toni
When a newspaper journalist covers the trial of a Japanese American accused of murder, he must come to terms with his own past.
Follows the life of Macon Dead, Jr., the son of the richest black family in a midwestern town, as he leaves home on a quest for personal freedom.
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
SPEAK Anderson, Laurie
Faulkner, William
A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.
The members of a genteel southern family are portrayed as petty failures, drunkards, suicides, pathological perverts, and idiots.
A SPOT OF BOTHER
A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE
Haddon, Mark
Williams, Tennessee
George Hall is ready to settle down to a comfortable retirement, until his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces she is marrying someone George disapproves of, and George is diagnosed with a devastating illness.
Blanche DuBois, a haggard and fragile southern beauty finds her pathetic last grasp at happiness cruelly destroyed in large part by her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE STONE ANGEL Laurence, Margaret
THE STONE DIARIES Shields, Carol
Story of an ordinary woman's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life.
Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, in a final struggle for independence, escapes from her nursing home and tries to come to terms with her tumultuous past.
A SUMMONS TO MEMPHIS
SULA
Taylor, Peter
Morrison, Toni
Traces the lives of two African-American heroines from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, to their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
THE SUN ALSO RISES Hemingway, Ernest
Traces the lives of two African-American heroines from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, to their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
A TALE OF TWO CITIES McBride, James
Charles Dickens' 1859 historical novel set in Paris and London during the French Revolution, in which a French nobleman, Charles Darnay, renounces his position and leaves his country, then returns during the Terror to save the life of a servant, putting himself in grave danger.
Traces the lives of two African-American heroines from their growing up together in a small Ohio town, to their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, to their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation.
THE TEMPEST Shakespeare, William
Presents the text of the darkly humorous play about Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, who is exiled to a magical island with his daughter, Miranda; and includes an introduction, an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare, and a note on the text used.
TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR Walker, Alice
Three couples, two in crisis, talk about themselves and reconstruct the missing pieces of the past and in the end, they deeply affect one another.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES Hardy, Thomas
THINGS FALL APART Achebe, Chinua
Tess Durbeyfield, an impoverished sixteen-year-old country girl, travels to the home of rich supposed relatives to "claim kin" at the urging of her parents, resulting in a tragedy that determines the course of Tess's life.
THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
Set in an Ibo village in Nigeria, the novel recreates preChristian tribal life and shows how the coming the white man led to the breaking up of the old ways.
THIS BOY’S LIFE Wolff, Tobias
O’Brien, Tim
Wolff's account of his boyhood and the process of growing up includes paper routes, whiskey, scouting, fistfights, friendship, betrayal, and America in the fifties.
Related stories, linked by recurring characters and an interwoven plot, recreate an American foot soldier's experience in the Vietnam War.
A THOUSAND ACRES Smiley, Jane
Dark truths and longsuppressed emotions come to the surface in 1979 when a successful Iowa farmer decides to cut one of his daughters out of his will.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS Hosseini, Khaleo
Afghan women Mariam and Laila grow close, despite their nearly twenty-year age difference and initial rivalry, as they suffer at the hands of a common enemy--their abusive, much-older husband, Rasheed.
TOM JONES Fielding, Henry
Woolf, Virginia
Describes a party gathered at a house on the Scottish coast, in later years only caretakers have the house, and in the last part of the story the house is again filled with surviving family members.
Presents Henry Fielding's 1749 comic novel in which Tom Jones, abandoned as an infant, is adopted by Squire Allworthy and amuses himself with amorous escapades until the day he decides to leave home and seek his fortune and real identity. 26
AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
TOUCHING THE VOID Simpson, Joe
THE TRIAL Kafka, Franz
Joe Simpson shares the story of his miraculous survival after he was injured while climbing in the Andes in 1985 and left for dead by his partner.
Joseph K. is suddenly arrested and must spend the rest of his life fighting a charge against him about which he can get no information.
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING
UNDER THE FEET OF JESUS Viramontes, Helena Maria
Kundera, Milan
Tomas, a hopeless philanderer and successful surgeon, flees Prague when the Russians invade in 1968 and heads for Switzerland where he must provide for himself and his lover by working as a window washer.
VANITY FAIR Thackeray, William Makepeace
A satirical look at Victorian manners recounting the experiences of two finishing school graduates, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley.
WISE BLOOD
Two young Mexican American migrant workers in California find hope in love, despite the poverty and social conditions in which they live.
WHALE TALK Crutcher, Chris
Intellectually and athletically gifted, TJ, a multiracial, adopted teenager, shuns organized sports and the gungho athletes at his high school until he agrees to form a swimming team and recruits some of the school's less popular students.
THE WOMAN WARRIOR
O’Connor Flannery
Kingston, Maxine Hong
After his release from the army at age twenty-two, Hazel Motes of Eastrod, Tennessee, moves to a Southern city where he falls under the spell of Asa Hawks, a blind street preacher who is led around by his daughter, Sabbath Lily.
A memoir of the Americanborn daughter of Chinese immigrants who lived within the traditions and fears of the Chinese past as well as the realities of the alien modern American culture.
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AHS CHALLENGE & HONORS READING LIST 2015-16
THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Naylor, Gloria
Bronte, Emily
A series of vignettes focusing on seven AfricanAmerican women who are residents of Brewster Place, showing how their reactions to certain situations are affected by their backgrounds, ages, dreams, and problems.
In early nineteenth-century Yorkshire, the passionate attachment between a headstrong young girl and a foundling boy brought up by her father causes tragedy for them and many others, even into the next generation.
A YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER Dorris, Michael
A saga of three generations of Indian women, beset by hardship and torn by angry secrets, yet joined by the indissoluble bonds of kinship.
Updated February 4, 2016 28
