Literature and Composition Reading Writing Thinking Teacher's Edition

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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!

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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.

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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

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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

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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

writer-1159815_640.jpg

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

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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.

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

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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.

adamspotteend.blogspot.com

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

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