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  Mr. Whatley, Carson High School
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  • Below are books that I personally recommend. They are in no particular order.
  • I have at least three copies of each of these books in my classroom for checkout.
  • All books meet the Rhetoric reading requirement.
  • **Parents--some books deal with adult content.  If you are uncomfortable with a book your son/daughter is reading, I'm more than happy to suggest a wealth of alternatives.
  • A quick shout out to my mom [Lin] for buying these books. Thanks mum!

Half a life--Strauss, Daren
About how some events undo us for the rest of our lives. 


*The Fault in Our Stars--Green, John
Never has cancer been a funny subject.  Until now.  Want to cry?  Want to feel love?  Read this.


Looking for Alaska--Green, John
Friendship, love, loss.  A wonderful novel about adolescence.



*The Kite Runner[4]— Hosseini, Khaled (371 pg.)[RL 5.2]
To what ends would you go to make up for a terrible mistake you made as a child?


 The Power of One [] Courtney, Bryce
I really, really think this is a great book, nuf said.

A Lesson Before Dying[5]—Gaines, E.J. (256 pg.)[RL 4.4]
Men are not pigs.  A man is convicted of a horrible murder—did he do it?  Does that even matter?  It’s about dying as a man
.


  *The Children of Men[4]—James, P.D. (351 pg.)[RL ]
What would the world be like if no one could give birth and no children were born?

 *Murphy’s Boy/One Child[1]—Hayden, Tory (219 pg.)[RL]
I think I’ll go and work with children who have serious issues and try to make the world better. Serious, serious issues.


Johnny Got His Gun[2]— Trumbo, Dalton (243 pg.) [RL 5.9]
Metallica wrote the song “ONE” for this little anti-war novel.  Truly a messed up and repelling, yet oddly beautiful novel.


*A Walk in the Woods[5]—Bryson, Bill (274 pg.) [RL 7.6]
Ever thought “Hey, I should go camping!”  Bryson gets drunk one night and invites old friends on a 3,000 mile backpacking trip.


*1984[7]—Orwell, George (326 pg.) [RL 8.9]
Big brother is watching you..  This is a must read for anyone.  If you die before reading this novel, you should be forgotten and made a nonperson.

  *Rebecca[7]— DuMaurier Daphne (357 pg.) [RL 6.8]
Gothic novel about a new bride who is a little worried that her new husband may have off’d his widowed wife.  Oh, and a crazy maid.

 *A Catcher in the Rye[5]—Salinger, J.D. (214 pg.)[RL 4.7]
To some, the main character is a big complainer.  Who cares—this book has been banned more than Harry Potter, and it’s the #1 hit for assassins.

*If I Die in a Combat Zone/The Things They Carried[3]—Obrien, Patrick (209 pg.)[RL 5.8]
Two very different works (one fiction, one nonfiction)  guaranteed to make you laugh, vomit, and cry all at the same time. 

 *The Road [0 ]— McCarthy, Cormac
A very uncomfortable book about a future where there is no future for humanity.  A father and son live on, simply travelling.

*Girl, Interrupted[5]—Kaysen, Sarah (pg. 111) [RL 5.4]
A real story about a young woman put in an institution for being crazy.  Is she nuts or is she normal?  What is crazy, afterall?

 *Into the Wild[5]—Krakauer, Jon [8.1] (pg. 98)
A young man’s body is found in a bus in a remote section of Alaska.  What caused his death?  What was he trying to find out there?  This is a book about self-discover, not a murder mystery.  Mr. Whatley could be this guy.

 *Flowers for Algernon[5]— Keyes, Daniel (219 pg.)[RL 5.8]
Following his doctor's instructions, engaging simpleton Charlie Gordon tells his own story in semi-literate "progris riports." He dimly wants to better himself, but with an IQ of 68 can't even beat the laboratory mouse Algernon at maze-solving.

*How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents[1]— Alvarez, Julia (289 pg.)[RL 6.2]
Fifteen tales vividly chronicle a Dominican family's exile in the Bronx, focusing on the four Garcia daughters' rebellion against their immigrant elders.

The Road--Cormac McCarthy :  
The quintessential guy book.  End of the world.  Father and son.  Survival.

 *The Plague[6]— Camus, Albert (308 pg.)[RL 8.2]
A meditation on a society trapped by a plague that seems to kill at random.  But, it’s a lot more than that.

  All Quiet on the Western Front[3]—Remarque, Enrique (296 pg.)[RL 6.0]
WWI told from the German perspective.  Be happy you aren’t this poor guy.

The Influencer:  the power to change anything.

  Beautiful Boy—Sheff, David
A close look at the results of Methamphetamine use and an insightful analysis of addiction.

  Siddhartha[5]—Hesse, Hermann (152 pg.)[RL 7.1]
A book about a young guy finding himself.  I’ve read it dozens of times.

The Bean Trees[2]—Kingsolver, Barbara (232 pg.)[RL 5.6]
I’m leaving town and not getting pregnant. (heck it could be the aspiration of any young girl.)  The world works out a little differently.

 Odyssey[5]—Homer (324 pg.)[RL 10.3]
The most accessible and enthralling epic of classical Greece.

 Brave New World[5]— Huxley, Aldous (267 pg.)[RL 11.4]
Huxley uses his erudite knowledge of human relations to compare our actual world with his prophetic fantasy of 1931. It is a frightening experience, indeed, to discover how much of his satirical prediction of a distant future became reality in so short a time

 For Whom the Bell Tolls[6]—Hemingway, Ernest (507 pg.)[RL 5.8]
A secret agent is sent to blow up a bridge.  There’s love involved.

Sand County Almanac[2]-- Leopold, Aldo (295 pg.)[RL 9.0]
Writing from the vantage of his summer shack along the banks of the Wisconsin River, Leopold mixes essay, polemic, and memoir in his book's pages.

 Master and Commander[2]— O’Brian, Patrick  (402 pg.) [RL 9.0]
         
The Good Earth[6]— Buck, Pearl S. (306 pg.)[RL 6.8]
A poignant tale about the life and labors of a Chinese farmer during the sweeping reign of the country¹s last emperor.

The Time Machine[5]  Wells, H.G— (76 pg.) [RL 7.4]
A Victorian scientist propels himself into the year a.d. 802,701. He finds two different races battling to live.

Lives of a Cell[6]— Thomas, Lewis (146 pg.)[RL 9]
A field biologist studying microbiology and connecting it in suprising ways to everything in our world.

Gandhi[5]— Fischer, Louis (189 pg.)
A careful analysis of one of the greatest figures in humanity.

 Hunger of Memory[2]— Rodriguez, Richard (195 pg.)[RL 7.2]          
Superb autobiographical essay ... Mr. Rodriguez offers himself as an example of the long labor of change: its costs, about which he is movingly frank, its loneliness, but also its triumph     

Prayer for Owen Meany[1]— Irving, John (617 pg.)[RL 7.7]
Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom.

The Fountainhead[5]— Rand, Ayn (694 pg.)[RL 7.0]
It is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey.

 On the Beach[1]—Shute, Neville [RL 6.3]
So what would you do if you knew that all life on Earth was ending in a month due to a global thermonuclear war?  Love, despair, longing, racecars…this one’s got it all.

The Glass Castle [3]--Jeannette Walls (288 pg.)[RL 8]
Think you have an unusual family.  This young woman makes “The Lost Boy/A Child Called ‘it’” and The Osbornes look normal..

Life of Pi—[ fiction, religion][1] Martel, Yann (319 pg.)[RL 5.7]
Ever thought it would be fun to be trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger?  Some religion and spirituality in this one.

 Dune[3]—Herbert, Frank [RL 5.7] (pg. 830)
Giant sandworms rule this planet where a young man whose father is killed must survive and take his place among the great leaders of the Arakkis. There’s a couple movies based on this book—they are terrible B flicks.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich[5]—Solzenietzen,  [RL 5.5] (pg. 220)
Another “you think your life sucks…” work.  It’s about a man who gets sent to Siberia for reasons unknown.  It’s one day in his life.


The Rhetoric Reading List is divided up by genre [sci/fi, memoir, fiction, & etc].  All books on the list have a brief synopsis; likewise, all books are college-level reading
2008_rhetoric_ap_reading_list_11-8-08.doc
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The Man Booker Prize books

Each year a single work of exceptional fiction is awarded the Booker Prize.  I'm currently reading The God of Small Things. 

Click here to see the list.
We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit. --Aristotle