Thirty-three Books (and One Book of Poetry) We Love

Sandia Prep English Department

Suggested Reading List for students entering 11th and 12th grades

Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver

In this provocative look at a young woman returning home to face her past and her need for a renewed sense of purpose, Kingsolver weaves Native American legends with environmental issues and with a search for love and identity.

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The novel’s opening line is justly famous: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here Tolstoy explores two characters’ very different ways of seeking meaning in their lives, one through a passionate love affair, the other through a commitment to family and to work.

Arranged Marriage, Chitra Divakaruni

In the collection of short stories, Divakaruni explores the lives and problems of several Indian women who struggle to adapt to new situations while maintaining their ties to traditional beliefs and habits.

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

Often called Faulkner’s most accessible novel, the work has a simple story line—that of a husband seeking to give his wife the burial she wished for—but it is told through the viewpoints of several characters. A fascinating and often comedic look at people’s hopes and delusions, their passions and compromises.

The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood

Here Canadian author Atwood examines a family over time, each member caught in a social tapestry of power and of current events and many searching to understand a tragic earlier event.

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut, a great American man of letters, introduces us to a world of American values circa 1973. In examining the decisions of an ordinary American man, the book is zany, quirky, darkly funny as it explores an ordinary man’s descent into madness.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

The story of a 300 pound would-be writer who hopes to become famous, the plot encompasses several Dominican characters as they travel to the States and then back home and struggle perhaps against a family curse brought on by their alliance with Trujillo, the political dictator.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Gogol

Gogol is considered a master of the realistic short story, yet some of the works here play beautifully with outrageous situations and fantastical happenings. The works read as contemporary as if they were written in the last decade. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky’s classic tale of a young student who plans and executes a murder. The plot follows him and others through the psychological realms caused by both the action of the crime and the fear of and looming fate of the punishment.

Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk

Palahniuk’s apocalyptic look at the contemporary world, the novel emphasizes the emptiness and sense of isolation modern young men feel. The narrator attends several self-help groups simply to find companionship and runs eventually into the outrageous Tyler Durden, the man who has established nation-wide fight clubs where other young males gather to do violence to one another. A sharp look at a culture gone empty.

Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro

Munro’s stories are known for taking wholly unexpected directions after their careful and richly set beginnings. In this collection, she looks at small town Canada—and sees characters filled with restlessness and regret and renewed hopes.

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland

Three exiles from contemporary society move to Palm Springs, take on meaningless jobs, tell one another tales. The novel has become controversial in that many readers find it exactly right about this generation right after the baby boomers yet many readers resent the view taken on themselves and their peers, a view that insists this generation has lots of information and no real wisdom.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Often cited as one the one hundred greatest books of the 20th Century, Ellison’s novel addresses the struggles and achievements and hopes of African-Americans in mid-century. The narrator is “invisible” because he holds no social position in American culture; his invisibility is both a response to his having been stereotyped and a truth about the position of his race in American society. The novel is full, lively, symbolic and thoughtful.

Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

Published in the 1930s, this Russian novel serves as satire of the Soviet/Stalinist regime yet also encompasses a love story and a fight between Satan and other forces. A brilliant work that readers find themselves absorbed in with ease, it is nonetheless a canny and sharp look at Soviet politics.

Naked, David Sedaris

David Sedaris has been called a literary “rock star,” for his public readings draw hundreds of people. His following enjoys the humor, the wonderful detail, the sheer playfulness of his writing. In this collection of essays, Sedaris takes a look at his family as he was growing up, at his adult siblings now, and at the strangest events of his life. Essentially a memoir, this is a very funny book.

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, protagonist Olive Kitteridge is a middle-school math teacher in Maine who is at once overbearing and kind, stern and patient, dismissive and understanding. Called a “novel in stories,” the book weaves together thirteen tales, most of which feature Olive in the central role.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

The seminal work of the Beat Generation, the autobiographical novel follows two young men on an exuberant and hedonistic road trip across America.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Considered the author’s masterpiece, the novel employs magical realism to tell the multi-generational story of the Buendía family in the fictional South American village of Macondo. It follows seven generations of the Buendias over 100 years as Macondo rises and falls.

A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

With a nod to Shakespeare’s King Lear, Smiley focuses on an Iowa farm family and the thousand-acre farm they share. A nightmarish tale unfolds after the family’s brutal patriarch, a prosperous farmer and businessman, announces his plan to turn the farm over to his daughters.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

The novel’s title character is a dwarfish boy with an unusual voice who believes he is an instrument of God. The story, set in New Hampshire, weaves the present (the late 1980s) and the past (memories from the 1950s and ‘60s) as it explores faith, religion, social justice and fate.

The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel involves Quoyle, a thirty-six-year-old newspaper reporter from New York who moves to Newfoundland to escape his emotionally traumatic life.

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

The stubborn Stamper family continues to supply lumber to an Oregon town after union loggers go on strike over wages and work hours. The patriarch’s motto—“never give an inch”—is at play as the Stampers engage with the union and the town and fight to define their own future.

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

This powerful, passionate story revolves around Macon Dead III (nicknamed Milkman) and the lives of his family and friends. Morrison combines magical realism, myth and folklore as she builds Milkman’s coming-of-age story, which begins in 1931.

Sophie’s Choice, William Styron

A story within a story, the profoundly moving novel focuses on the relationships among three people and on the title’s namesake, a woman who recounts her imprisonment at Auschwitz.

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

With a lean and compelling style, Hemingway tells the story of Jake Barnes, a veteran of World War I whose injury haunts his relationship with a beautiful and flamboyant woman who is the love of his life. The novel embodies the angst and spiritual dissolution of the post-World War I generation, known as the Lost Generation.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

The novel’s protagonist, Tom Ripley, is a liar and a schemer who longs for wealth and the lifestyle it provides. This psychological thriller finds the amoral Ripley dispatched to Italy, where he seizes the chance to live the life he feels he deserves.

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

Achebe’s deceptively simple story depicts the rise and fall of Okonkwo, a volatile, self-made man who is the respected and influential leader of his Nigerian village. The novel, published two years before Nigeria declared independence from Great Britain, also touches on the costs of colonialism, when first missionaries and then representatives of the colonial government arrive.

The Trial, Franz Kafka

Published in 1925, the philosophical novel involves a man arrested on his thirtieth birthday for a crime about which he knows nothing. The accused, a man known only as Joseph K., never learns the charges against him and struggles with his unraveling life after his arrest.

Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri

A superbly crafted work of eight stories that takes readers from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they enter the lives of sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, friends and lovers.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Peter Hedges

Disillusioned and trapped by responsibility, Gilbert Grape sacks groceries in a monotonous Iowa town, where he lives with his morbidly obese mother, his mentally challenged brother, and his two sisters. As his brother’s eighteenth birthday nears, Gilbert is jostled into honest self-examination.

White Noise, Don DeLillo

A story told in three parts, White Noise features Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a Midwestern college who is accidentally exposed to a cloud of noxious chemicals. The novel explores themes that involve death, post-modern family, and identity.

Wild Decembers, Edna O’Brien

A sister and brother in Western Ireland’s wild country maintain their farm but must adjust to a recent immigrant to their neighborhood, a young Australian who has inherited a cousin’s neighboring acreage and who brings a sense of romance and of newness and of danger to their everyday lives. O’Brien is one of Ireland’s foremost novelists, known for her honest vision of human lives in a difficult, troubled land.

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

The collection of related short stories is centered on protagonist George Willard and the inhabitants of the fictional town of Winesburg, Ohio. Each story, with its plain but poignant prose, focuses on a character’s psychological insights.

Evidence: Poems, Mary Oliver

A collection of one of our great living poets, this work is characterized by Oliver’s love of place and her talent with detail. A nature poet of great talent, Oliver reveals a vision of stillness and appreciation that will resonate with many readers.