Independent Reading Assignment: 1st Quarter AP English Language and Composition Verver Name: Choose a novel to read closely, keeping a collection or journal of reading responses, roughly one for every twenty pages of your novel. For each entry, choose a quote, character, or event in the section for response or comment. Your journal – typed or legibly hand-written on standard note paper or in a spiral notebook – will be graded based on thoughtfulness and thoroughness. Your reading journal must be turned in on the day of your presentation. Identify a main theme (the writer’s central idea or main message about life) in the novel and then draw a connection between the literary elements of the novel (conflict, character, setting, etc.) and that main theme. Prepare a 4–6 minute oral presentation in which you defend what you have chosen as a main theme by showing examples of where the theme appears in the novel and what role those examples play in communicating the novel’s central idea or main message about life. Do not merely summarize or re-tell the story of the novel, but provide enough of the plot to give context to your conclusions. Remember that you must support any assertions you make in your presentation with sufficient evidence and examples from your novel. Evaluation of your presentation will be based entirely on how well you support whatever conclusions you reach. Scoring guidelines include: Within 4–6 minute time limit Assignment addressed thoughtfully and completely Ideas organized and easy to follow Able to defend conclusions when questioned by the instructor Independent Reading Assignment AP English Language and Composition Verver Choose a novel from the following list of American literature for analysis 1st quarter. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Indian by Sherman Alexie Angelou The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Bellow Ironweed by William Kennedy The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Mark Twain The Known World by Edward P. Jones All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore The American by Henry James Cooper American Pastoral by Philip Roth Main Street by Sinclair Lewis An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser Moby Dick by Herman Melville Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand My Ántonia by Willa Cather The Awakening by Kate Chopin The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Native Son by Richard Wright The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison On the Road by Jack Kerouac Call It Sleep by Henry Roth The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty The Call of the Wild by Jack London Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion Catch-22 by Joseph Heller The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger Rabbit, Run by John Updike China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane The Chosen by Chaim Potok The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne The Color Purple by Alice Walker Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner Gilead by Marilynne Robinson The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Hurston The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Howell Underworld by Don DeLillo The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton The World According to Garp by John Irving .