Books Recommended for Students Entering 9Th and 10Th Grades

Books Recommended for Students Entering 9th and 10th Grades

FICTION, POETRY, PLAYS:

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday A short, brilliant fantasia, "not quite a political bad dream, nor a metaphysical thriller, nor a cosmic joke in the form of a spy novel, but...something of all three" (Kingsley Amis).

Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao The character of Oscar, a “ghetto nerd” from Paterson, N.J is the focus of Díaz’s descriptive, lyrical writing. Díaz describes how the experiences of Oscar’s parents and grandparents in Santo Domingo impact Oscar’s destiny.

Athol Fugard, Master Harold...and the Boys The scene: St. George's Park Tea Room, Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The time: around 1982. The characters: Sam and Willie, black South Africans who work in the tea room, and Hally ("Master Harold"), a white South African high-school student whose mother owns the cafe. The action: a painful attempt to define love, loyalty and identity. Valley Song, a play by South Africa's master playwright which looks hopefully and wistfully at the new, post-apartheid South Africa and is a wonderful complement to his earlier Master Harold.

Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World This is a mystery story that contains within it an introduction to the major periods, intellectual trends, and thinkers of the European tradition. The story, which begins when a fifteen-year-old girl receives an anonymous note that asks "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" cleverly reflects and plays upon the questions raised in the philosophical sections of the book, and is especially recommended as a review or follow-up to the Greco-Roman beginnings studied in Ancient History.

Gunter Grass, Cat and Mouse With a mixture of loathing and worship, a set of adolescent pals in WW2 Germany chew seagull droppings and follow after their gangling, insider-outsider friend on summer-seaside exploits that fit with Freudian ease into the surrounding war.

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Alternately funny, violent, and heartbreaking. Randall McMurphy gets himself committed to a mental institution to avoid prison. Quickly, though, he crosses the dominating, infantilizing Nurse Ratched, and they begin an escalating series of battles for control of the world and of McMurphy's mind. Seen through the eyes of a mute Indian, whose story of liberation this finally becomes.

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Communist who, after breaking with the Party, spent much of the rest of his life trying to explain how it attracted, held on to and destroyed its most loyal members. Darkness at Noon is his fictional recreation of an Old Bolshevik whose own loyalty to the Party is used to destroy him: he confesses to crimes he never committed. The definitive study of the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s.

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here Frequently humorous in its depiction of how American fascism, presided over by "Buzz" Windrip and his legions of armed "Minute Men," comes to Fort Beulah, Vermont in the 1930s; nonetheless, a deadly serious critique of America between the wars.

V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street A series of brief life studies, each about a resident of Miguel Street in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, where Naipaul grew up. These people live and talk with a strong street-wise vitality, even as their stubborn oddities carry them to obscure, distinctive ends.

Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander (or any other novel of the 17 in the series). O'Brian's novels tell the story of a British naval captain and his ship's doctor (in reality a secret agent) during the Napoleonic Wars. Far more than conventional historical fiction: a lot of action, quirky conversation, and psychological insight - all in very elegant, very readable prose.

Edwin O'Connor, The Last Hurrah A barely disguised portrait of Boston's legendary mayor, James Michael Curley, Skeffington is an over-sized character, and the novel richly evokes the vanishing world of Irish-American Boston.

George Orwell, Animal Farm Ostensibly a simple story of farm animals trying to run the farm themselves, this is also a stark representation of Stalinist brutality, which poses questions about the essential corruptibility of power. It caused a sensation when it was first published fifty-five years ago.

Grace Paley, Collected Stories or any one of her three books of short stories: Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, or Later the Same Day. Grace Paley writes about relationships - parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and enemies - in situations where moral concerns constantly collide with practical questions. Her stories are at once low-key and fanciful, funny and sad.

Ann Patchett, Run Set in Cambridge MA, Run is a story about how tight-knit multiracial family readjusts upon becoming acquainted with once-hidden relatives.

Octavio Paz, Early Poems 1935-1955 Selected early poems from this Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet, translated by such distinguished poets as William Carlos Williams and Denise Levertov.

Edgar Allan Poe, Stories (there are many collections). One of the most influential 19th-century American writers, inventor of the detective story, master of the tale of horror and suspense, Poe is not an author to read when you are alone at night!

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front The author was a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the horrors of World War One and the postwar suffering of the men returning to Germany after the war.

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep The story of an immigrant Jewish boy growing up in New York's lower East side. Through his eyes we see the terrors of poverty, the violence of street gangs, the sexual conflicts of his parents, and his own sexual initiation.

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea Rhys, herself a Creole (in Caribbean usage, a white West Indian), wrote this short, intense novel in outrage at Charlotte Bronte's portrayal of Bertha in Jane Eyre. Rhys re-imagines Bertha (now called by her lovely middle name Antoinette) as a vulnerable and romantic young woman largely shaped by her island's painful history - by what happened to her family, and between black people and white people, as a consequence of slavery. You do not need to have read Jane Eyre to enjoy the novel's vivid evocation of an exotic and sensuous culture, as seen alternately through the eyes of those who belong there and those who visit and recoil.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde The large, well-formed, impressively successful Jekyll watches himself being slowly consumed by another man, the twisted, furtive, murderous Hyde - his other self. A psychological classic told with relentless and disturbing skill.

Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts You might say that West invented cynicism - the American kind, at least. Miss Lonelyhearts is a newspaperman (yes, man) who gives solace in his column to those who write to him from the great American void. Right away, you can see the opportunities for cynicism. The sheer dismal proliferant misshapen banality of American sorrow achieves, however, a force and mass under which even Miss Lonelyhearts may sink. Will he? The book is very witty and mercifully brief.

NON-FICTION:

Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land A detailed firsthand account by a member of the Malcolm X generation of everything that could go wrong in a young man's life growing up in Harlem, New York. Raw, direct, warm-blooded, reflective.

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time This autobiography, a few years back, had a cult following among Commonwealth students. It is a powerful book, both bleak and funny. Conroy examines, with unsparing honesty, his own character and how he "slipped into the state of being in trouble," as well as the crazy, sometimes brutal adults in his life. It leaves a reader with a vivid sense of raw experience, but also with a kind of wonder at the writer's ability to survive by his wits and his strength of soul.

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood Instead of trying to find in her own youth some grand scheme of development, Dillard gives a series of trenchant retrospections in which oddities are pursued with fearless intensity and the indestructible self is looked on as a marvel.

Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl Egan describes the disastrous repercussions of America’s decision to promote the Great Plains as fertile farmland by describing the personal accounts of the unknowing farmers who settled there.

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl Anne Frank's diary, which she kept between the ages of 13 and 15, captures in fresh, tart language the day-to-day joys, discoveries and pains of an ardent and observant girl. At the same time it matter-of-factly (and therefore even more poignantly) captures the fear, hunger, tedium and confinement felt by the eight Jews (including Anne, her sister, and her parents) who fled the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands by hiding in the "Secret Annex" in the back of an Amsterdam warehouse. They were discovered in August 1944, and all but Anne's father eventually died in the camps just weeks before the Allied victory. Get the new "Definitive" edition, which restores material deemed too sensitive for original publication.

Maxim Gorky, Childhood The death of his delicate and kindly father leaves Gorky at the mercy of a family - his mother's - consumed by violent jealousies and greed. A candid, simply-written account of utter catastrophes, human nature gone out of control - and of an innocent strength of soul that is profoundly Russian.

Stephen J. Gould, The Panda's Thumb A selection of essays on evolution. Gould's strength is in his ability to find large truths in the particulars, even the minutiae, of an organism or event. Especially recommended after Biology 9.

Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki A romantic anthropologist, Thor Heyerdahl, set out to test his theory that Polynesia was originally settled by South Americans. He recreated the original venture, making a reed raft by hand out of materials native to South America, and relying on ocean currents and trade winds for movement. This is the story of that adventure.

Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers This biography examines the life of a modern mathematician. Along with the entire life of Paul Erdos, related through the eyes of his many admirers and friends, it contains much information on the habits of mathematicians: their humor, commitment, fears, and failings. The book also touches upon some of the most fun and interesting fields of mathematics.

Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie An autobiography of a 20th-century poet (Rosie is the first girl he falls in love with). It is funny, beautifully written, and full of details about the tiny village in the English Cotswolds where he grew up. The local character of the place is as vivid as the characters who inhabit it.

Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon's Ring A wonderful book about animals and their habits; a most felicitous combination of keen scientific accuracy and affectionately humorous narrative.

Alan Moorehead, The White Nile Mad Englishmen and others set off to discover the source of the Nile. Try to find an edition with pictures and maps.

John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks In 1931 an aged holy man of the Oglala Sioux (cousin to Crazy Horse), in order to "save his Great Vision for men," relates his life story to a white man he feels "has been sent to learn what I know."

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind This book explores the need to have right brain as well as left-brain skills to excel in the 21st century.

Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These are the answers Pollen proposes to America’s current dysfunctional relationship to food.

Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It Ballplayers in the first half-century of the game were a rough-cut and colorful lot. The zestful, outright way they played, lived, and talked in those days comes across with great freshness in this book - a tremendous relief from the crass money-making that now dominates the game and the times we live in.

Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes A short, non-mathematical account of the birth of the universe, by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

Books Recommended for Students Entering 11th and 12th Grades

FICTION, POETRY, PLAYS:

Vassily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter A gripping evocation of the life of a Russian-Georgian family from the time of the Revolution in 1917 to the end of World War II, through the worst oppression of the Stalinist periods. This is the first volume in Aksyonov's proposed trilogy. You don't have to know that it's been compared to War and Peace and Dr. Zhivago to get carried away by it.

Isabel Allende, Stories of Eva Luna A collection of short fiction concerning the relations between men and women, parents and children, real people and ghosts, richly spiced with sex, religion, and a delightfully magical kind of realism.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice This novel deals with English family life - that is, with various forms of embarrassment - and sets the standard for lightness, deftness, and bite.

Joyce Carey, The Horse's Mouth A crotchety old artist living on a Thames houseboat searches for the perfect walls upon which to paint the feet and plump models he so adores, while slowly dying from too much smoking and too little attention to himself.

Evan S. Connell, Mr. Bridge and/or Mrs. Bridge In short sentences, tiny chapters, and language so flat as to be almost painful, the author thrusts his reader into the ghastliness of the ordinary lives of his middle-class, middle-American, middle-aged protagonists. These books are at once devastating and funny.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment Murdering his landlady casts nihilistic young intellectual Raskolnikov into a mental maelstrom no human being could long endure.

Dostoyevsky, "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” A central text from The Brothers Karamazov, in which the saintly brother (Alyosha) and the intellectual brother (Ivan) debate the nature of God and of Man. Who gets the better of the argument?

Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground "I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased." In this novella, the anonymous narrator declares war on human society, and especially on reason and intellect.

Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha In an utterly unsentimental way, the author tells the story of a 10-year-old working-class boy in 1960s Dublin. Joyful and pained, cruel and gentle, courageous and fearful, the main character lives through adventures both hilarious and terribly sad involving his friends, his family, and his own growing up.

Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah Dove traces her grandparents through a series of poems. The voice of each takes half of the book, moving back and forth between Thomas and his mandolin on the river to Beulah watching the sweeping "crow's wing" of the Civil Rights Movement on television.

Melissa Faye Green, Praying for Sheetrock Melissa Faye Green recreates the racially-charged events of rural Darien, Georgia in the 1960s-70s. The story is told in a range of voices - the narratives of people actually involved in the incidents - interspersed with Green's vivid images of the time. It is colorful, true to historical fact, and thought- provoking. A documentary in words.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist During a night in a café in Lahore the narrator Changez, a Pakistani man, recounts his experience in America before and after 9/11 to an American tourist.

Seamus Heaney, Selected Poems Arguably Ireland's greatest living poet, Heaney's subjects of the poems range, from the 10,000-year- old execution of a young adulteress, to a boy folding sheets with his mother, to a conversation with the ghost of James Joyce.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street The story of Carol Kennicott, née Milford, the new bride of Dr. Will Kennicott, physician and leading citizen of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Fresh out of Blodgett College in Minneapolis, Carol travels home with her husband, hoping to satisfy her reformist zeal. Unfortunately, the good citizens of Gopher Prairie do not want to be reformed.

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude A constantly surprising, endlessly inventive novel following the history of the Buendia family and the imaginary South American town of Macondo. In the end it becomes a metaphorical history of the world.

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried This linked series of what could be read as individual stories forces the reader - through almost surreal scenes, recounted in the most precise language - to ponder what it felt like to be a soldier in Viet Nam (as the author was). And at every step of the way, O'Brien wrestles with the age-old question: what is truth? what is fiction?

Flannery O'Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge A short collection of her best stories. (If you get hooked, go out and get the full Collected Stories.) Look up the word "grotesque" - in all its facets - in the dictionary. If it applies to any American writer, it does most of all to Flannery O'Connor, whose characters - misfits, cripples, hapless creatures, lost souls - discover the truth about the world in the course of surprising, often shocking misadventures. And she is funny.

Ann Patchett, Run Set in Cambridge MA, Run is a story about how tight-knit multiracial family readjusts upon becoming acquainted with once-hidden relatives.

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Insider gossip about Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Apollinaire, Hemingway, Stein, et al.; shrewd remarks about Art and Life; Paris when it was the place to be for new departures in just about everything (1907-32).

Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters (translated from the Japanese by Edward Seidensticker) A story of four sisters, daughters of a merchant family from Osaka whose fortunes are in decline. On the eve of the Second World War, they find their lives being shaped, tested, and torn in unexpected ways. As the world around these women changes, they must reinvent themselves, or perish.

Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons Russia: May, 1859. A perfectly nice young man brings back to his family's estate a university degree and his best friend, whose advanced ideas - nihilism, science - poison the air. The nice young man has a sister, too...but Bazarov, the friend, doesn't make it to 1917.

Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger This beautifully written novel tells two stories at once: that of a desperate Liverpool merchant trying to recoup a fortune lost on the cotton market by entering the African slave trade, and that of the "cargo" on the slave ship financed by the merchant. The slaves rebel with the aid of some of the white crew and scuttle the ship off the coast of South Florida, where they establish a secret utopian society. The merchant, ruined, commits suicide, and his son, embittered because his father's ruin has destroyed his own marriage prospects, is determined to hunt down the slaves he holds responsible.

NON-FICTION

Roger Angell, Late Innings If you like baseball, you must read Angell. His articles in The New Yorker covered the unfolding drama of passing seasons, pausing to reflect on the enduring beauty of the game itself. He is the philosopher king of sportswriters, the one man to whom ballplayers seem willing to speak with real intelligence about why this pursuit engages them heart and soul.

John Barrow, Pi in the Sky Readable but sophisticated look at the nature of mathematics and mathematicians.

Petr Beckmann, A History of Pi Excellent history of the number Pi wound together with an examination of how, historically, knowledge and academics have been treated and why. A fun and trivia-packed journey as well as a politically motivated one.

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers “In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.” – Random House

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene A simple, elegant, maddeningly persuasive argument that individual genes compete and cooperate to shape the process of natural selection.

Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Desert, 2 volumes Unprotected and almost without means of support, Doughty lived among the Bedouin at a time (1876-8) when Arabia was unknown to outsiders. This is a book to read for the sensation of being utterly cut off from home, for total immersion in the details of a hard and alien kind of life, and for the mystery of Doughty's touchy persistence in such an unlikely ordeal.

Richard Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman Like Watson's The Double Helix, this is not politically correct, but it does catch the exciting flavor of modern physics.

Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face In elegant, unblinking prose, without a trace of self-pity, Grealy tells the wrenching story of growing up "different" and "disfigured" by major jaw surgery for cancer at the age of five. The pain, fear, and isolation of her cancer treatments and of the more than thirty reconstructive procedures which followed, the confusion and anger at being ostracized by her peers, the perverse pleasures of highlighting her uniqueness, will strike startlingly familiar chords in anyone who has ever felt ugly or inadequate - that is, in anyone.

John Gribbin, In Search of Schrödinger's Cat An easy introduction to quantum physics, but it is better if you've had some physics first.

Michael Herr, Dispatches A correspondent in Viet Nam, Herr tells the GIs' story in their own language and tells it in all its horror - not as it was gussied up for the American newspapers. It cost Herr 10 years and a breakdown to write the book.

Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Nation Identity This book tells the story of King Philip's War - a conflict that nearly extinguished early New England between 1674-76 in a fresh and innovative way. One of the best features is the final section, which shows how the war was commemorated, distorted, mythologized and forgotten to the point that, for many readers, Lepore's New England will seem foreign and exotic. Lepore writes in a sparkling, eloquent prose that is all too rare in academic history today. This book won the Bancroft Prize for American History last year.

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor Mayhew set out to discover how the vast new urban underclass of 19th-century London made its living, thought, and talked. He found hundreds of highly evolved groups, each with its own specialized skill, character, lore, customs, slang. Dip into this immense work, based largely on interviews, and see what Malthus and Marx might have missed about the sewer-scavengers, sellers of monkeys, pickpockets, swindlers, flea-circus men, etc., etc.

Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop A short and elegantly written biography of the driving force behind the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which not only tells the story of an English gentleman turned Massachusetts governor, but also provides a window into the Puritan mind.

Heinz Pagels, The Cosmic Code An introduction to the history and ideas of quantum mechanics, with discussions of the philosophical implications of the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality and the many-worlds model of reality.

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind This book explores the need to have right brain as well as left-brain skills to excel in the 21st century.

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct Everything you always wanted to learn about language, explained clearly and humorously by MIT's Steven Pinker. Read this to learn respectable arguments for using "hopefully" at the beginning of a sentence. If you've ever thought it odd that you drive on a parkway and park on a driveway, or that you play at a recital and recite at a play, you'll find this fascinating reading.

Michael Pollan. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These are the answers Pollen proposes to America’s current dysfunctional relationship to food.

Slavomir Rawicz, A Long Walk The true story - told in coolly matter-of-fact language - of a young Polish army officer who, in 1941, is caught, tried, and sentenced to 25 years of hard labor by his Soviet Russian captors. Shipped in cattle cars to Irkutsk in Siberia, along with hundreds of fellow prisoners, he is forced to march to the site of their yet-to-be-built prison near the Arctic Circle. After only a short while in the camp, Slav and five others escape, and begin an extraordinary trek from Siberia to India and freedom.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Sacks presents a dozen or so short portraits of people with bizarre neurological conditions: a sailor with no ability to make new memories, who meets Sacks as if for the first time every day; a man who temporarily attains the olfactory discrimination of a bloodhound after a drug overdose; and the title character. Sacks' goal is not to explain the underlying pathology - virtually none of these conditions is understood well - but to explore the extraordinary range of traumatic changes in the self to which the self nonetheless adapts and which it incorporates.

Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad Hitler's invasion of Russia got as far as Leningrad. This is the story of the German attack and siege of the city; of what breaks down and what endures under starvation, Russian cold, grinding warfare. Grim reading, but a revelation of what people could find worth fighting for.

William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary A vivid day-to-day account of Hitler's rise to power.

Wole Soyinka, Ake: The Years of Childhood Soyinka's father ruled over a walled garden of a school in Abeokuta; this is his account of that father, school, and town, as well as of his own unbelievably willful, buoyant, and curious small self. Fine reading after the cryptic first five pages.

Lewis Thomas, The Fragile Species This is a selection of essays written by a biologist who also practiced medicine. He approaches from a refreshing perspective the topics of the environment, cancer, AIDS, aging, brain function, and language. His assumptions about the history of life and the present state of society are thought provoking.

Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes A short, non-mathematical account of the birth of the universe, by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. If you haven't read this before, try it now.

Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays Woolf's novels stretched that form past its limits, and her talk could dazzle even the most brilliant guests. The searching restlessness of her mind could yield torments of self-doubt, but also gives these essays great reflective range, depth, and imaginative force. For an idea of what "the life of the mind" might be, this is a hard book to beat.