My School Summer Reading List

I know its a little too late to put up this list considering school starts in less then 2 weeks for me and I have yet to read any of the books I was suppose to.

But here are all the books that are needed to be read, understood, annotated, understood front to back cover-back to front cover, formulate a critical essay in which I make up shit about themes and how this relates to my life and whatever the hell the teacher wants.


The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Synopsis

A brilliant profile of the Lost Generation, Hemingway's first bestseller captures life among the expatriates on Paris's Left Bank during the 1920s, the brutality of bullfighting in Spain, and the moral and spiritual dissolution of a generation.

This one I'm looking forward to reading. Why? Because Jess Mariano, the bad boy hottie who played the only literate boyfriend of Rory in Gilmore Girls, mentioned Ernest Hemingway. And ever since then I been wanting to read it. Now I get to kill two bird with one stone.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Faulkner's distinctive narrative structures--the uses of multiple points of view and the inner psychological voices of the characters--in one of its most successful incarnations here in As I Lay Dying. In the story, the members of the Bundren family must take the body of Addie, matriarch of the family, to the town where Addie wanted to be buried. Along the way, we listen to each of the members on the macabre pilgrimage, while Faulkner heaps upon them various flavors of disaster. Contains the famous chapter completing the equation about mothers and fish--you'll see. (Amazon)

Now this sounds interesting. But I have this horrid feeling the writing will be weird, thus making me hate the book. We'll see? But I am interested by the synopsis unlike the Hemingway book.

The Things They Carried by Tim O' Brien

One of the first questions people ask about The Things They Carried is this: Is it a novel, or a collection of short stories? The title page refers to the book simply as "a work of fiction," defying the conscientious reader's need to categorize this masterpiece. It is both: a collection of interrelated short pieces which ultimately reads with the dramatic force and tension of a novel. Yet each one of the twenty-two short pieces is written with such care, emotional content, and prosaic precision that it could stand on its own.


I started reading this on the bus when I first got a copy from the teacher right before summer vacation. I read a page or two and the writing seemed easy to understand and not cryptic. So that's a bonus. *thumbs up*


Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is a novel by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. First published on April 10, 1925, it is set in Long Island's North Shore and New York City during the summer of 1922. The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age." Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roaring" 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers and led to an increase in organized crime. [google books]


This is a book that I heard great things about from my brother, who doesn't read unless he is required to for school. So hopefully, for once he's right and it will be something I like.

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So what are some books you read/reading for your summer assignments for school? Love to know. Do you hate, surprisingly enjoyed it?