Reader Response Assignment -100 points

This year, you will be required to read FOUR (4) books outside of class to build your knowledge bank.  After each book, you will submit a response to turnitin through Canvas that will give your peers and me a chance to hear your thoughts, feelings, reactions, and questions about the ideas, actions, characters, settings, plot, themes, and other elements in the chosen book.  You can't be wrong in your responses as long as you follow directions!  Let me hear your voice.

• Finish each book, write and submit your response by the following dates:

Book 1: by November 17, 2017

Book 2: by January 19, 2018

Book 3: by March 23, 2018

Book 4: by May 18, 2018

• Along with your name, date and class period, write the prompt # in the top left corner on each new response.
• The title of your response should be the author and title of the novel. Length must be minimum of 400 words.

Below is a list of prompts from which to choose.  To be sure that you are responding and thinking about your reading in many different ways, you may only use each prompt once.  Cross out the number once you’ve responded. 

1. Did this book make you laugh? cry? cringe? smile? cheer? Explain with textual evidence.
2. What connections are there between the book and your life? Explain with textual evidence.
3. What is the most important sentence(s)/paragraph/passage in this book? The most important event or feeling?  Explain with textual evidence.
4. Who should or shouldn’t read this book? Why? Provide textual evidence.

To help ensure that you are choosing rigorous novels (and since Junior year is supposed to entail American Literature), I am providing you with a list of approved authors and corresponding work.  You must choose from this list.  IF you want to go outside of this list, you need to talk to me and have me check off on the choice (ex: William Shakespeare).

Mitch Albom – Tuesdays with Morrie/ The 5 People You Meet in Heaven

Julia Alvarez – How Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents/ In the Time of Butterflies

Maya Angelou – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings/ Letter to My Daughter

James Baldwin – Go Tell It on the Mountain/ Sonny’s Blues

Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451/ Something Wicked This Way Comes

Octavia Butler - Kindred

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood

Willa Cather – My Antonia

Orson Scott Card – Ender’s Game

Ta-Nehisi Coates –Between the World and Me

Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Frederick Douglass – The Narrative of the Life

Dave Eggers – Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man

Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature or other essay collections

William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying

Tina Fey – Bossy Pants

1. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby

Jonathan S Foer – Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter

Joseph Heller  - Catch 22

Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises/ A Farewell to Arms/ A Moveable Feast/ The Old Man and the Sea

Frank Herbert - Dune

John Irving – The World According to Garp

Henry James – The Portrait of a Lady

Jack Kerouac – On the Road

Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Stephen King – The Dark Tower series

Erik Larson – The Devil in the White City/ In the Garden of Beasts

James McBride – The Color of Water

Herman Melville – Moby Dick

Arthur Miller – The Crucible

Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind

Toni Morrison – The Bluest Eye/ Song of Solomon

Tim O’Brien – Tomcat in Love

Ayn Rand – Anthem/ Fountainhead

Karen Russell - Swamplandia

David Sedaris – Me Talk Pretty One Day

John Steinbeck – East of Eden/ Cannery Row

Henry David Thoreau – Walden/ On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five

Alice Walker – The Color Purple

Jeannette Walls – The Glass Castle

HG Wells – The War of the Worlds

Edith Wharton – Ethan Frome

Tennessee Williams – The Glass Menagerie/ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

Richard Wright – Native Son/ Black Boy