Essay for American Dream Reading List for Ap Lang

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A lot of students wonder if at that place'southward a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Composition exam. While there's not an official College-Board AP reading list, at that place are books that will be more useful for you to read than others as you fix for the exam. In this commodity, I'll break downward why you lot need to read books to set up, how many you lot should plan on reading, and what you should read—including poetry.

Why Practice Y'all Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test?

This might seem like kind of an obvious question—you need to read books considering information technology's a literature exam! But actually, at that place are 3 specific reasons why you need to read novels, poems, and plays in preparation for the AP Lit Test.

To Increase Your Familiarity With Different Eras and Genres of Literature

Reading a diverse array of novels, poetry and plays from dissimilar eras and genres will help y'all exist familiar with the language that appears in the various passages on the AP Lit test's multiple choice and essay sections. If y'all read primarily modern works, for example, you may stumble through analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet. And then, having a basic familiarity level with the linguistic communication of a broad variety of literary works will assistance keep y'all from floundering in confusion on test day because you're seeing a piece of work unlike anything you've ever read.

To Ameliorate Your Close-Reading Skills

You'll also want to read to improve your close-reading and rhetorical assay skills. When you do read, really engage with the text: think almost what the author'southward doing to construct the novel/poem/play/etc., what literary techniques and motifs are being deployed, and what major themes are at play. Yous don't necessarily need to drill downward to the same caste on every text, but you lot should always exist thinking, "Why did the author write this piece this way?"

For the Student Option Free-Response Question

Perhaps the most critical piece in reading to ready for the AP Lit examination, however, is for the student choice free-response question. For the tertiary question on the 2d exam section, you'll be asked to examine how a specific theme works in 1 novel or play that you choose. The College Board does provide an instance list of works, but you can choose any piece of work you similar just so long as it has adequate "literary merit." Nevertheless, y'all need to be closely familiar with more than than 1 work so that you can be prepared for any theme the Higher Lath throws at you!

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Note: Not an effective reading method.

How Many Books Practise Y'all Need to Read for the AP Exam?

That depends. In terms of reading to increase your familiarity with literature from different eras and genres and to improve your close-reading skills, the more books you have time to read, the better. You'll want to read them all with an eye for comprehension and basic analysis, but you don't necessarily need to focus equally on every volume you read.

For the purposes of the student pick question, however, you'll want to read books more than closely, so that you could write a detailed, convincing belittling essay about any of their themes. So yous should know the plot, characters, themes, and major literary devices or motifs used inside and out. Since you won't know what theme you'll be asked to write about in accelerate, you'll demand to exist prepared to write a pupil choice question on more than just i book.

Of the books you lot read for prep both in and out of course, cull four to five books that are thematically diverse to learn specially well in preparation for the exam. You may want to read these more once, and you certainly want to take detailed notes on everything that's going on in those books to aid y'all think key points and themes. Discussing them with a friend or mentor who has besides read the book will help you generate ideas on what'south almost interesting or intriguing about the piece of work and how its themes operate in the text.

You may exist doing some of these activities anyways for books you are assigned to read for class, and those books might be solid choices if you want to be as efficient every bit possible. Books yous write essays about for schoolhouse are also great choices to include in your four to 5 book stable since y'all will be becoming super-familiar with them for the writing y'all exercise in class anyways.

In answer to the question, then, of how many books you need to read for the AP Lit exam: you lot need to know four to five inside and out, and beyond that, the more than the better!

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Know the books. Love the books.

What Books Do Y'all Need to Read for the AP Exam?

The almost important thing for the educatee choice complimentary-response question is that the work you select needs to have "literary merit." What does this mean? In the context of the Higher Lath, this means you should stick with works of literary fiction. And then in general, avoid mysteries, fantasies, romance novels, and then on.

If y'all're looking for ideas, authors and works that take won prestigious prizes similar the Pulitzer, Man Booker, the National Book Honor, and so on are good choices. Annihilation you lot read specifically for your AP literature class is a proficient choice, too. If yous aren't sure if a particular work has the kind of literary merit the College Board is looking for, ask your AP teacher.

When creating your own AP Literature reading list for the student choice gratis-response, endeavour to selection works that are diverse in author, setting, genre, and theme. This volition maximize your ability to comprehensively reply a student choice question about pretty much anything with one of the works you lot've focused on.

Then, I might, for instance, cull:

  • A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare, play, 1605

    • Major themes and devices: magic, dreams, transformation, foolishness, man vs. adult female, play-inside-a-play

  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, novel, 1847

    • Major themes and devices: subversive love, exile, social and economic class, suffering and passion, vengeance and violence, unreliable narrator, frame narrative, family unit dysfunction, intergenerational narratives.

  • The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, novel, 1920

    • Major themes and devices: Tradition and duty, personal liberty, hypocrisy, irony, social class, family, "maintaining appearances", laurels

  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966

    • Major themes and devices: slavery, race, magic, madness, wildness, civilization vs. chaos, imperialism, gender

As yous can see, while in that location is some thematic overlap in my called works, they also comprehend a broad swathe of themes. They are also all very dissimilar in way (although you lot'll merely have to have my word on that one unless you go look at all of them yourself), and they span a range of time periods and genres as well.

Even so, while there's not necessarily a specific, mandated AP Literature reading list, at that place are books that come up again and again on the suggestion lists for student selection complimentary-response questions. When a book comes up over and again on exams, this suggests both that it'southward thematically rich, so you can use information technology to reply lots of dissimilar kinds of questions, and that the College Board sees a lot of value in the work.

To that end, I've assembled a list, separated by time menstruum, of all the books that accept appeared on the suggested works list for student choice free-response questions at least twice since 2003. While you certainly shouldn't be aiming to read all of these books (there'due south way too many for that!), these are all solid choices for the student option essay. Other books past authors from this list are likewise going to be stiff choices. Information technology's probable that some of your class reading volition overlap with this list, too.

I've divided up the works into chunks past time catamenia. In addition to title, each entry includes the writer, whether the piece of work is a novel, play, or something else, and when information technology was first published or performed. Works are alphabetical by writer.

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Warning: Not all works pictured included in AP Literature reading list below.

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Ancient Works

Title

Writer

Genre

Date

Medea

Euripides

play

431 BC

The Odyssey

Homer

epic verse form

(no date)

Antigone

Sophocles

play

441 BC

Oedipus Rex

Sophocles

play

429 BC

1500-1799

Championship

Author

Genre

Date

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

novel

1605

Tom Jones

Henry Fielding

novel

1749

Equally You lot Like It

Shakespeare

play

1623

Julius Caesar

Shakespeare

play

1599

Rex Lear

Shakespeare

play

1606

A Midsummer Nighttime's Dream

Shakespeare

play

1605

The Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare

play

1605

Othello

Shakespeare

play

1604

The Tempest

Shakespeare

play

1611

Candide

Voltaire

novel

1759

1800-1899

Title

Author

Genre

Appointment

Emma

Jane Austen

novel

1815

Mansfield Park

Jane Austen

novel

1814

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

novel

1813

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte

novel

1847

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte

novel

1847

The Enkindling

Kate Chopin

novel

1899

The Reddish Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane

novel

1895

Dour Business firm

Charles Dickens

novel

1853

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens

novel

1850

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens

novel

1861

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

novel

1837

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

novel

1859

Law-breaking and Penalization

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

novel

1866

Madame Bovary

Gustave Flaubert

novel

1856

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy

novel

1895

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Thomas Hardy

novel

1886

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy

novel

1891

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

novel

1850

A Doll's Business firm

Henrik Ibsen

play

1879

The American

Henry James

novel

1877

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James

novel

1881

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

novel

1851

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

novel

1818

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

novel

1877

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain

novel

1885

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The Queen of AP Literature surveys her kingdom.

1900-1939

Title

Author

Genre

Date

My Ántonia

Willa Cather

novel

1918

The Cherry-red Orchard

Anton Chekhov

play

1904

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

novel

1902

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser

novel

1900

Murder in the Cathedral

T.Southward. Eliot

play

1935

Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner

novel

1936

Every bit I Lay Dying

William Faulkner

novel

1930

Calorie-free in August

William Faulkner

novel

1932

The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

novel

1929

The Dandy Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald

novel

1925

A Passage to Bharat

E.M. Forster

novel

1924

The Little Foxes

Lillian Hellman

play

1939

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston

novel

1937

Dauntless New World

Aldous Huxley

novel

1931

A Portrait of the Artist as a Boyfriend

James Joyce

novel

1916

Billy Budd

Herman Melville

novel

1924

Major Barbara

George Bernard Shaw

play

1905

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

novel

1939

The Age of Innocence

Edith Wharton

novel

1920

Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton

novel

1911

The House of Mirth

Edith Wharton

novel

1905

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf

novel

1925

1940-1969

Title

Author

Genre

Appointment

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

novel

1958

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee

play

1962

Another Country

James Baldwin

novel

1962

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

play

1953

The Plague

Albert Camus

novel

1947

Invisible Homo

Ralph Ellison

novel

1952

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

novel

1954

A Raisin in the Lord's day

Lorraine Hansberry

play

1959

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

novel

1961

Ane Flew Over the Cuckoo' s Nest

Ken Kesey

novel

1962

A Separate Peace

John Knowles

novel

1959

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee

novel

1960

The Crucible

Arthur Miller

play

1953

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller

play

1949

House Made of Dawn

N. Scott Momaday

novel

1968

Wise Blood

Flannery O'Connor

novel

1952

1984

George Orwell

novel

1949

Cry, the Beloved Country

Alan Paton

novel

1948

All the Rex'southward Men

Robert Penn Warren

novel

1946

The Chosen

Chaim Potok

novel

1967

Broad Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

novel

1966

The Catcher in the Rye

JD Salinger

novel

1951

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Tom Stoppard

play

1966

Cat's Cradle

Kurt Vonnegut

novel

1963

The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams

play

1945

A Streetcar Named Want

Tennessee Williams

play

1947

Black Boy

Richard Wright

memoir

1945

Native Son

Richard Wright

novel

1940

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Don't go trapped in a literature vortex!

1970-1989

Championship

Author

Genre

Date

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya

novel

1972

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros

novel

1984

"Master Harold" . . . and the boys

Athol Fugard

play

1982

Yard. Butterfly

David Henry Hwang

play

1988

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

novel

1989

The Adult female Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston

memoir

1976

Obasan

Joy Kogawa

novel

1981

Beloved

Toni Morrison

novel

1987

The Bluest Center

Toni Morrison

novel

1970

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison

novel

1977

Sula

Toni Morrison

novel

1973

Jasmine

Bharati Mukherjee

novel

1989

The Women of Brewster Place

Gloria Naylor

novel

1982

Going After Cacciato

Tim O'Brien

novel

1978

Equus

Peter Shaffer

play

1973

Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko

novel

1977

Sophie's Option

William Styron

novel

1979

The Colour Purple

Alice Walker

novel

1982

Fences

August Wilson

play

1983

The Piano Lesson

August Wilson

play

1987

1990-Present

Title

Writer

Genre

Date

Reservation Blues

Sherman Alexie

novel

1995

The Bullheaded Assassin

Margaret Atwood

novel

2000

Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood

novel

2003

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

Kim Edwards

novel

2005

Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier

novel

1997

Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson

novel

1994

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini

novel

2003

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini

novel

2007

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro

novel

2005

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

novel

1998

The Namesake

Jumpa Lahiri

novel

2004

All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy

novel

1992

Atonement

Ian McEwan

novel

2001

Native Speaker

Chang Rae-Lee

novel

1995

The God of Small Things

Arundhati Roy

novel

1997

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley

novel

1991

The Bonesetter'due south Daughter

Amy Tan

novel

2001

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski

novel

2008

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Don't stay in one reading position for also long, or yous'll stop up similar this guy.

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An Addendum on Poetry

Y'all probably won't be writing nearly poetry on your student choice essay—most just aren't meaty plenty in terms of activity and character to merit a full-length essay on the themes when you don't actually have the poem in front of you (a major exception being The Odyssey). That doesn't mean that y'all shouldn't exist reading poetry, though! You should be reading a wide multifariousness of poets from dissimilar eras to become comfortable with all the varieties of poetic linguistic communication. This will brand the poetry analysis essay and the multiple-choice questions about poetry much easier!

See this list of poets compiled from the list given on page 10 of the AP Course and Exam Description for AP Lit, separated out past time period. For those poets who were working during more than one of the fourth dimension periods sketched out below, I tried to place them in the era in which they were more active.

I've placed an asterisk next to the nearly notable and important poets in the listing; you lot should aim to read one or 2 poems by each of the starred poets to get familiar with a broad range of poetic styles and eras.

14th-17th Centuries

  1. Anne Bradstreet
  2. Geoffrey Chaucer
  3. John Donne
  4. George Herbert
  5. Ben Jonson
  6. Andrew Marvell
  7. John Milton
  8. William Shakespeare*

18th-19th Centuries

  1. William Blake*
  2. Robert Browning
  3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge*
  4. Emily Dickinson*
  5. Paul Laurence Dunbar
  6. George Gordon, Lord Byron
  7. Gerard Manley Hopkins
  8. John Keats*
  9. Edgar Allan Poe*
  10. Alexander Pope*
  11. Percy Bysshe Shelley*
  12. Alfred, Lord Tennyson*
  13. Walt Whitman*
  14. William Wordsworth*

Early on-Mid 20th Century

  1. Westward. H. Auden
  2. Elizabeth Bishop
  3. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)
  4. T. S. Eliot*
  5. Robert Frost*
  6. Langston Hughes*
  7. Philip Larkin
  8. Robert Lowell
  9. Marianne Moore
  10. Sylvia Plath*
  11. Anne Sexton*
  12. Wallace Stevens
  13. William Carlos Williams
  14. William Butler Yeats*

Late 20th Century-Nowadays

  1. Edward Kamau Brathwaite
  2. Gwendolyn Brooks
  3. Lorna Dee Cervantes
  4. Lucille Clifton
  5. Billy Collins
  6. Rita Pigeon
  7. Joy Harjo
  8. Seamus Heaney
  9. Garrett Hongo
  10. Adrienne Rich
  11. Leslie Marmon Silko
  12. Cathy Song
  13. Derek Walcott
  14. Richard Wilbur

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You might rather burn books than read them after the test, but please refrain.

Cardinal Takeaways

Why practice you lot demand to read books to set for AP Lit? For three reasons:

#ane: To become familiar with a diversity of literary eras and genres
#ii: To work on your shut-reading skills
#three: To become closely familiar with four-five works for the purposes of the student choice gratuitous-response essay analyzing a theme in a piece of work of your choice.

How many books do you need to read? Well, you definitely need to get very familiar with four-five for essay-writing purposes, and beyond that, the more the better!

Which books should y'all read? Check out the AP English Literature reading list in this article to see works that have appeared on ii or more than "suggested works" lists on free-response prompts since 2003.

And don't forget to read some poetry likewise! Encounter some College Board recommended poets listed in this article.

What's Next?

Run into my expert guide to the AP Literature examination for more examination tips!

The multiple-choice section of the AP Literature exam is a cardinal office of your score. Acquire everything you need to know near it in our complete guide to AP Lit multiple-selection questions.

Taking other APs? Check out our skilful guides to the AP Chemistry test, AP U.s. History, AP Earth History, AP Psychology, and AP Biological science.

Looking for other volume recommendation lists from PrepScholar? We've compiled lists of the vii books y'all must read if you're a pre-med and the 31 books to read earlier graduating high schoolhouse.

One of the unmarried most important parts of your college application is what classes you lot choose to take in high schoolhouse (in conjunction with how well you do in those classes). Our team of PrepScholar admissions experts take compiled their knowledge into this single guide to planning out your high school course schedule. Nosotros'll advise you on how to residual your schedule between regular and honors/AP/IB courses, how to choose your extracurriculars, and what classes you lot can't afford not to take.

Plan Your Course Schedule

Have friends who as well need help with exam prep? Share this article!

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Most the Writer

Ellen has extensive educational activity mentorship experience and is deeply committed to helping students succeed in all areas of life. She received a BA from Harvard in Folklore and Mythology and is currently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University.

mcclearyroonstank.blogspot.com

Source: https://blog.prepscholar.com/ap-literature-reading-list

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