2013 High School Summer Reading List

Nine Stories is a collection of short stories by American fiction writer J. D. Salinger released in May 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor".

Tim O'Brien:

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

Sylvia Plath

Written in the early 1960s, and Sylvia Plath's only full-length prose work, The Bell Jar is an autobiographical novel that relates the childhood longings and descent into madness of Plath's alter-ego, Esther Greenwood.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew, journeys to Ukraine in search of Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather's life during the Nazi liquidation of Trachimbrod, his family shtetl. Armed with maps, cigarettes and many copies of an old photograph of Augustine and his grandfather, Jonathan begins his adventure with Ukrainian native and soon-to-be good friend, Alexander "Alex" Perchov, who is Foer's age and very fond of American pop culture, albeit culture that is already out of date in the United States. Alex studied English at his university, and even though his knowledge of the language is not "first-rate", he becomes the translator. Alex's "blind" grandfather and his "deranged seeing-eye bitch," Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr., accompany them on their journey. Throughout the book, the meaning of love is deeply examined.

Uzodinma Iweala

The novel is about an African boy named Agu who is forced to become a child soldier. His family lived in a small village. When war came, Agu’s mother and sister had to leave on a bus but Agu, his father, and a shoesman try to escape and Agu’s father is shot down and killed. Agu hides and is soon found by soldiers who coerce him to join their rebel force. In a bloody initiation, the commander forces him to kill an unarmed soldier.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer explores the topics of factory farming and commercial fisheries. He examines topics such as by-catch and slaughterhouse conditions, saying that Indonesian shrimp trawlers kill 26 pounds of sea creatures for every 1 pound of shrimp they collect, and that in American slaughterhouses, cows are consistently "bled, dismembered, and skinned while conscious." He also explores the health risks which pervade American factory farming, including the claims that H1N1 originated in a North Carolina factory farm, and that 98 percent of American chicken is infected with campylobacter or salmonella at the time of consumption.

Téa Obreht

Jesmyn Ward

A Gulf Coast town encrusted with generations of poverty and racism. A pregnant, motherless girl on the brink of womanhood feasting on dinners of crunchy Top Ramen noodles and warm sugar water. Meanwhile, Hurricane Katrina muscles its way along the coastline, slinkily pooling rolls of water across the landscape.

Alex Award

Kate Brian

Rory Miler was living a nondescript life. Fighting with her annoying older sister was pretty routine, and their father's lack of interest in them made there home a sad and lonely place. The family was happy before their mother's death. Their lives are turned upside down when Rory foils a serial killer.

Maggie Stiefvater

Though she is from a family of clairvoyants, Blue Sargent's only gift seems to be that she makes other people's talents stronger, and when she meets Gansey, one of the Raven Boys from the expensive Aglionby Academy, she discovers that he has talents of his own--and that together their talents are a dangerous mix.

by Sherri Smith

After a string of devastating hurricanes and a severe outbreak of Delta Fever, the Gulf Coast has been quarantined. Years later, residents of the Outer States are under the assumption that life in the Delta is all but extinct…but in reality, a new primitive society has been born.

Fen de la Guerre is living with the O-Positive blood tribe in the Delta when they are ambushed. Left with her tribe leader’s newborn, Fen is determined to get the baby to a better life over the wall before her blood becomes tainted. Fen meets Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States who has snuck into the Delta illegally. Brought together by chance, kept together by danger, Fen and Daniel navigate the wasteland of Orleans. In the end, they are each other’s last hope for survival.

Sherri L. Smith delivers an expertly crafted story about a fierce heroine whose powerful voice and firm determination will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.