How Many of These Books Have You Read?

Incoming Holmdel High School students are encouraged to read at least one of the following quality books at their grade level over the summer, whether they pick it up from the library or download it on a e-reader device.

Here is the 2011 Holmdel High School Summer Reading Program, as posted on the district website. More suggestions follow. Perhaps its a list to consider thumbing through, even for the rest of us.

9th GRADE STUDENTS: The Body of Christopher of Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci; Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson; Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith by Deborah Heiligman (non-fiction).

10th GRADE STUDENTS: Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers; Feed by M.T. Anderson; and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom (non-fiction)

11th GRADE STUDENTS: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Husseini; Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco Stork; and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (non-fiction)

12th GRADE STUDENTS: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon; On the Beach by Nevil Shute; Nation by Terry Pratchett

Additional Voluntary Suggested Reading from the Humanities Website (These books cannot be substituted for the required summer reading selection.)

Entering 9th GRADE STUDENTS

TRADITIONAL / CLASSIC

The Old Man and the Sea – Hemingway

Bless the Beasts and the Children – Swarthout

Summer of My German Soldier – Greene

Oliver Twist – Dickens

Martian Chronicles – Bradbury

And Then There Were None – Christie

CONTEMPORARY / HIGH INTEREST

Eyes of the Dragon – King

Childhood’s End – Clarke

Watership Down – Adams

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Hurston

The House on Mango Street – Cisneros

Incredible Journey – Burnford

The Man Without a Face – Holland

Gentlehands – Kerr

Homecoming – Voigt

The Terminal Man – Crichton

Entering 10TH GRADE STUDENTS

FICTION

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

The Chosen – Chaim Potok

Executive Orders – Tom Clancy

The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan

Main Street – Sinclair Lewis

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway

The Natural – Bernard Malamud

Saint Maybe – Anne Tyler

Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut

A Death in the Family – James Agee

House of Mirth – Edith Wharton

Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ragtime – E. L. Doctorow

The Women of Brewster Place- Gloria Naylor

DRAMA

All in the Timing – David Ives

The Children’s Hour – Lillian Hellman

All My Sons – Arthur Miller

Fences – August Wilson

NONFICTION

Friday Night Lights – Bissinger

POETRY

The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the 20th Century – ed. Hayden Carruth

E.E. Cummings: A Selection of Poems by E.E. Cummings

Selected Poems by Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes

Entering 11TH GRADE STUDENTS

CLASSICS / TRADITIONAL

The Good Earth – Pearl Buck

Grapes of Wrath – Steinbeck

Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevsky

Demian - Hesse

CONTEMPORARY / HIGH INTEREST

 The Hundred Secret Senses – Tan

Romance Reader – Abraham

Debt of Honor – Clancy

The Red Tent – Diamant

Airframe – Crichton

NONFICTION

Days of Grace – Ashe

When Pride Still Mattered – Lombardi

It’s Not About the Bike – Armstrong

Slaves in the Family – Ball

Amazing Grace - Kozol

Into Thin Air – Krakauer

To America – Ambrose

Running with the Buffaloes

Entering 12TH GRADE STUDENTS

CLASSICS / TRADITIONAL

Sense and Sensibility – Austin

Twelfth Night – Shakespeare

The Three Musketeers – Dumas

Great Stories of Sherlock Holmes – Doyle

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – Joyce

Love in the Time of Cholera – Marquez

Jane Eyre – Bronte

Much Ado About Nothing – Shakespeare

Lord Jim – Conrad

My Antonia – Cather

CONTEMPORARY / HIGH INTEREST

 Blithe Spirit – Coward

Timeline – Crichton

The Thorn Birds – McCullough

The Crystal Cave – Stewart

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Kesey

Fellowship of the Ring – Tolkein

Executive Orders – Clancy

The Mists of Avalon – Bradley

The Once and Future King - White

NON-FICTION – MISCELLANEOUS

Seabiscuit: An American Legend – Hillenbrand

A Season on the Brink – Feinstein

The Last Amateurs – Feinstein

Lords of the Realm – Helyar

Growing Up - Baker

Savage Inequalities – Kozol

The Boys of Summer - Kahn

A Room of One’s Own – Woolf

And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner City Students – Corwain