English III Summer Reading Choices & Descriptions

Western Reserve Academy English Department English III Summer Reading Choices & Descriptions* 2012

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie portrays a mother whose preoccupation with her past as a Southern belle and her unrealistic dreams for her children's futures threaten to smother her painfully shy daughter and her aspiring writer son.

Fences by August Wilson Fences is the story of a responsible yet otherwise flawed black garbage collector in pre-Civil Rights America who, in August Wilson's hands, rises to the level of an epic hero. Deemed a generational play, it mirrors the classic struggle of status quo, tradition, and age, versus change, innovation, and youth

August: Osage County by Tracy Letts August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest—and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed.

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley Set in a Catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960’s, this play centers on a strict older nun who confronts a priest that she suspects is sexually abusing a student. After his denial, she seeks the aid of a younger nun and the victim’s mother to validate her suspicions.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan In 1949 four Chinese women-drawn together by the shadow of their past-begin meeting in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and "say" stories. They call their gathering the Joy Luck Club. Nearly forty years later, one of the members has died, and her daughter has come to take her place, only to learn of her mother's lifelong wish--and the tragic way in which it has come true.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Huck Finn is a homeless rebel who loves freedom more than respectability. He isn't above lying and stealing, but he faces a battle with his conscience when he meets up with a runaway slave named Jim, who provides him with his first experience of love, acceptance, and a sense of responsibility…. The boy's adventures along the Mississippi River form the framework of a series of moral lessons, revelations of a corrupt society, and contrasts of innocence and hypocrisy.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West." As "Sal Paradise" and "Dean Moriarty," the two roam the country in a quest for self-knowledge and experience.

___ * Descriptions from Amazon.com --courtesy of Jacque Miller at the John D. Ong Library.