Literature and Composition Reading Writing Thinking Teacher's Edition

A lot of students wonder if there's a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Limerick exam. While in that location's not an official Higher-Board AP reading listing, there are books that will be more useful for y'all to read than others as yous prepare for the exam. In this commodity, I'll suspension down why yous need to read books to gear up, how many yous should plan on reading, and what you should read—including poetry.

Why Exercise Yous Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test?

This might seem like kind of an obvious question—yous need to read books because information technology'south a literature examination! Only actually, there are three specific reasons why you need to read novels, poems, and plays in grooming for the AP Lit Test.

To Increment Your Familiarity With Different Eras and Genres of Literature

Reading a diverse array of novels, poetry and plays from different eras and genres will assistance you be familiar with the language that appears in the diverse passages on the AP Lit exam's multiple choice and essay sections. If y'all read primarily modern works, for instance, you may stumble through analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet. So, having a basic familiarity level with the linguistic communication of a wide variety of literary works volition help continue you from floundering in confusion on test day because you're seeing a work different annihilation you lot've e'er read.

To Improve Your Shut-Reading Skills

You'll also desire to read to improve your shut-reading and rhetorical assay skills. When y'all practice read, actually engage with the text: think about what the author's doing to construct the novel/verse form/play/etc., what literary techniques and motifs are existence deployed, and what major themes are at play. You don't necessarily need to drill downwards to the same degree on every text, just you should always be thinking, "Why did the author write this piece this fashion?"

For the Student Choice Free-Response Question

Possibly the most critical piece in reading to prepare for the AP Lit test, however, is for the student choice costless-response question. For the third question on the 2d test department, you'll be asked to examine how a specific theme works in one novel or play that y'all choose. The College Board does provide an example list of works, but yous can choose any work you like simply so long as information technology has adequate "literary merit." All the same, you need to exist closely familiar with more one piece of work so that you lot tin be prepared for whatever theme the College Board throws at you!

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Note: Not an effective reading method.

How Many Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam?

That depends. In terms of reading to increment your familiarity with literature from different eras and genres and to amend your close-reading skills, the more books you lot have time to read, the meliorate. You'll want to read them all with an centre for comprehension and bones analysis, but you don't necessarily need to focus every bit on every book yous read.

For the purposes of the student choice question, however, you'll want to read books more closely, and then that you could write a detailed, convincing belittling essay about any of their themes. And so you should know the plot, characters, themes, and major literary devices or motifs used within and out. Since you won't know what theme you'll be asked to write about in advance, you'll need to be prepared to write a student choice question on more than merely one book.

Of the books you read for prep both in and out of class, choose four to 5 books that are thematically diverse to learn especially well in training for the examination. You may want to read these more than once, and you certainly desire to accept detailed notes on everything that's going on in those books to aid you think key points and themes. Discussing them with a friend or mentor who has also read the book will help you generate ideas on what's most interesting or intriguing about the work and how its themes operate in the text.

Yous 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 exist every bit efficient every bit possible. Books you lot write essays about for school are also corking choices to include in your four to five book stable since you will be becoming super-familiar with them for the writing you do in class anyways.

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

Know the books. Dearest the books.

What Books Do Yous Need to Read for the AP Exam?

The most important affair for the pupil choice costless-response question is that the work you select needs to have "literary merit." What does this mean? In the context of the College Board, this means you should stick with works of literary fiction. So in general, avoid mysteries, fantasies, romance novels, and so on.

If yous're looking for ideas, authors and works that accept won prestigious prizes like the Pulitzer, Man Booker, the National Book Award, and then on are good choices. Annihilation y'all read specifically for your AP literature class is a good selection, also. If you aren't sure if a particular work has the kind of literary merit the College Lath is looking for, ask your AP instructor.

When creating your ain AP Literature reading list for the student option free-response, try to option works that are various in author, setting, genre, and theme. This will maximize your ability to comprehensively answer a student choice question about pretty much anything with one of the works you've focused on.

So, I might, for example, choose:

• A Midsummer Nighttime'southward Dream, Shakespeare, play, 1605

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

• Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, novel, 1847

  • Major themes and devices: destructive love, exile, social and economical course, suffering and passion, vengeance and violence, unreliable narrator, frame narrative, family 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", honour

• Broad Sargasso Bounding main, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966

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

Equally you can see, while there is some thematic overlap in my chosen works, they also cover a wide swathe of themes. They are also all very dissimilar in style (although yous'll only take to take my word on that one unless you go look at all of them yourself), and they bridge a range of time periods and genres as well.

However, while there's non necessarily a specific, mandated AP Literature reading list, at that place are books that come upward again and again on the suggestion lists for educatee choice free-response questions. When a book comes up over and over again on exams, this suggests both that information technology'southward thematically rich, so you lot can use it to reply lots of different kinds of questions, and that the College Board sees a lot of value in the work.

To that terminate, I've assembled a listing, separated past fourth dimension period, of all the books that take appeared on the suggested works listing for pupil choice free-response questions at least twice since 2003. While you certainly shouldn't be aiming to read all of these books (at that place's way too many for that!), these are all solid choices for the educatee choice essay. Other books by authors from this list are also going to be strong choices. It'south likely that some of your grade reading volition overlap with this list, too.

I've divided upwards the works into chunks by time flow. In improver to title, each entry includes the author, whether the work is a novel, play, or something else, and when it was commencement published or performed. Works are alphabetical by writer.

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

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Ancient Works

Title	Writer	Genre	Engagement
Medea	Euripides	play	431 BC
The Odyssey	Homer	epic poem	(no appointment)
Antigone	Sophocles	play	441 BC
Oedipus Rex	Sophocles	play	429 BC

1500-1799

Title	Author	Genre	Date
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	novel	1605
Tom Jones	Henry Fielding	novel	1749
As You Similar It	Shakespeare	play	1623
Julius Caesar	Shakespeare	play	1599
King Lear	Shakespeare	play	1606
A Midsummer Dark'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	Writer	Genre	Engagement
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 Awakening	Kate Chopin	novel	1899
The Blood-red Badge of Backbone	Stephen Crane	novel	1895
Dour House	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
Crime and Punishment	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 Alphabetic character	Nathaniel Hawthorne	novel	1850
A Doll'due south 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

The Queen of AP Literature surveys her kingdom.

1900-1939

Title	Author	Genre	Appointment
My Ántonia	Willa Cather	novel	1918
The Cerise Orchard	Anton Chekhov	play	1904
Center of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	novel	1902
Sister Carrie	Theodore Dreiser	novel	1900
Murder in the Cathedral	T.S. Eliot	play	1935
Absalom, Absalom!	William Faulkner	novel	1936
Equally I Lay Dying	William Faulkner	novel	1930
Lite 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 India	Eastward.Chiliad. Forster	novel	1924
The Niggling Foxes	Lillian Hellman	play	1939
Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston	novel	1937
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	novel	1931
A Portrait of the Artist every bit a Young Human being	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 Historic period 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	Date
Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	novel	1958
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?	Edward Albee	play	1962
Some other Country	James Baldwin	novel	1962
Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett	play	1953
The Plague	Albert Camus	novel	1947
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	novel	1952
Lord of the Flies	William Golding	novel	1954
A Raisin in the Sun	Lorraine Hansberry	play	1959
Catch-22	Joseph Heller	novel	1961
One 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	Northward. 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 King's 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
True cat's Cradle	Kurt Vonnegut	novel	1963
The Drinking glass Menagerie	Tennessee Williams	play	1945
A Streetcar Named Desire	Tennessee Williams	play	1947
Black Boy	Richard Wright	memoir	1945
Native Son	Richard Wright	novel	1940

Don't get trapped in a literature vortex!

1970-1989

Title	Author	Genre	Date
Anoint Me, Ultima	Rudolfo Anaya	novel	1972
The House on Mango Street	Sandra Cisneros	novel	1984
"Chief Harold" . . . and the boys	Athol Fugard	play	1982
G. 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
Dearest	Toni Morrison	novel	1987
The Bluest Heart	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 Afterwards Cacciato	Tim O'Brien	novel	1978
Equus	Peter Shaffer	play	1973
Ceremony	Leslie Marmon Silko	novel	1977
Sophie'south Choice	William Styron	novel	1979
The Color Imperial	Alice Walker	novel	1982
Fences	August Wilson	play	1983
The Pianoforte Lesson	Baronial Wilson	play	1987

1990-Present

Championship	Writer	Genre	Date
Reservation Blues	Sherman Alexie	novel	1995
The Blind Assassin	Margaret Atwood	novel	2000
Oryx and Crake	Margaret Atwood	novel	2003
The Memory Keeper'south 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 G Splendid Suns	Khaled Hosseini	novel	2007
Never Allow Me Become	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 Pocket-sized Things	Arundhati Roy	novel	1997
A K Acres	Jane Smiley	novel	1991
The Bonesetter's Girl	Amy Tan	novel	2001
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle	David Wroblewski	novel	2008

Don't stay in one reading position for too long, or you lot'll stop upwardly like this guy.

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An Annex on Poesy

You probably won't be writing about poetry on your student choice essay—virtually just aren't meaty enough in terms of activity and character to merit a full-length essay on the themes when you don't really accept the poem in front of you (a major exception beingness The Odyssey). That doesn't mean that you shouldn't exist reading poesy, though! You lot should be reading a broad variety of poets from different eras to become comfortable with all the varieties of poetic language. This volition make the poetry analysis essay and the multiple-choice questions most poetry much easier!

See this listing of poets compiled from the listing given on folio ten of the AP Course and Test Description for AP Lit, separated out by 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 most notable and of import poets in the list; you should aim to read one or two 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. W. 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 Dove
7. Joy Harjo
8. Seamus Heaney
9. Garrett Hongo
10. Adrienne Rich
11. Leslie Marmon Silko
12. Cathy Vocal
13. Derek Walcott
14. Richard Wilbur

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

Fundamental Takeaways

Why do you need to read books to prepare for AP Lit? For three reasons:

#i: To become familiar with a variety of literary eras and genres
#2: To work on your close-reading skills
#three: To go closely familiar with iv-five works for the purposes of the student choice free-response essay analyzing a theme in a piece of work of your choice.

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

Which books should you read? Check out the AP English Literature reading listing in this article to see works that have appeared on 2 or more "suggested works" lists on gratuitous-response prompts since 2003.

And don't forget to read some verse too! See some Higher Lath recommended poets listed in this article.

What's Next?

Encounter my adept guide to the AP Literature test for more exam tips!

The multiple-selection section of the AP Literature exam is a key part of your score. Acquire everything you need to know most it in our complete guide to AP Lit multiple-pick questions.

Taking other APs? Check out our expert guides to the AP Chemistry exam, AP The states History, AP World History, AP Psychology, and AP Biology.

Looking for other book recommendation lists from PrepScholar? We've compiled lists of the seven books yous must read if yous're a pre-med and the 31 books to read before graduating loftier school.

One of the single most important parts of your higher awarding is what classes you choose to have in high school (in conjunction with how well you do in those classes). Our team of PrepScholar admissions experts accept compiled their knowledge into this single guide to planning out your loftier school course schedule. We'll advise you on how to remainder your schedule between regular and honors/AP/IB courses, how to choose your extracurriculars, and what classes you tin't afford not to accept.

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

Nearly the Writer

Ellen has extensive education 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.

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

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