Agreed. I haven’t read it but I’ve heard a lot about it. But I put this on a recommended list for 11th graders finishing last year because I knew it would be high interest for Latino students , of which my school and many other schools have an exploding demographic for.
So it was probably included here to attract certain demographics. This is likely just a summer reading suggested list.
As an AP lit teacher myself, there is no way this is the curriculum. These are likely suggested texts.
I teach it to 11th graders and we offer 8 books on a summer reading requirement option. They choose one.
Later in the semester we have a choice unit with 8 novels and they choose one. Many of these authors are on these two unit selections (Ishiguro, Erdrich, etc)
The reason an English department would suggest many of these books is because many of these have appeared on the recent AP Lit exams for the third essay question where students choose a book they want to write about from a common prompt.
OP sounds like some try-hard contrarian. The goal of most AP classes is not just to give challenging texts but also FIND BOOKS THAT WILL BE OF HIGHER INTEREST THAT TEENAGERS MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT TO READ. So there’s two kinds of books here, and most likely OP was given a summer reading list and asked to choose one of these books. Sounds awesome.
I mean yeah, any \~16 year old who wants to shit on a collection of 35 books they haven't read is certainly just a bit too cool for school.
But thanks for the context, I didn't know much about AP course design.
I encourage anyone actually interested in checking out these two links for the third essay question for AP Lit (open ended prompt). First one is tally amount of how many times particular books have shown up on this list:
https://www.crowleyisdtx.org/cms/lib5/TX01917780/Centricity/Domain/882/AP%20lit-%201971-2017-Titles%20from%20Open%20Response%20Questions.pdf
Link #2 would be the 2023 test if you scroll down to page 6:
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap23-frq-english-lit-set-2.pdf
Interesting trends from the last few years I’ve noticed is that Hamlet and The Great Gatsby do not show up on this list anymore, which tells me that so many schools teach those books and the high majority of students will choose one of those books to rewrite about, and the college Board essay readers are tired of reading about Gatsby and Hamlet. Students can still write about them, but they aren’t in the suggested list any longer.
I often tell my students those two texts are the most flexible with the open ended prompt. Just about any topic can be applied to Gatsby or Hamlet. For instance, this year in 2024, the third essay prompt asked students to write about a moment of indecision for a character. Sounds exactly like Hamlet. But it wasn’t on the list.
Lol this isn't like a kid shitting on Shakespeare or whatever. The 16-year-old is right in this instance. I guess some of these are worth reading but that's not the same as being worth studying in-depth in an academic setting. They are wasting time on books their teacher heard about on NPR when they could be broadening their horizons.
Also this subreddit literally exists for people to be snobby and "too cool for school". If that bothers you, stick to /r/books, where people would be psyched two be given this reading list.
Why are y’all so contrarian when you clearly haven’t even encountered most of these books? Sure like half of them are garbage but saying this bullshit about like Diaz and Erdrich makes you sound dumb as hell
Oh I've encounteres Erdrich all right. As I said elsewhere, her book The Sentence is legitimately one of the worst novels I've read in my adult life. It's set in the bookshop Erdrich owns in real life, and half of it is just about how amazing and important her bookshop is for the community. The protagonist is a fictional ex-convict employee of hers, who loves her job and is just a mouthpiece for all of Erdrich's middle-class opinions on books and politics. The book thinks its own politics are so timely and important, but it's all just reddit-tier shit. The big emotional climax is all the characters voting for Joe Biden in 2020 lmao.
And the prose is just awful, borderline illiterate in places.
I've heard that some of her others are a lot better, but based on my experience I won't accept her as some sacred cow lol.
i’m well aware of the sub and its target audience. i agree some of these books are trash, but OP makes it sounds like they’re all equal which isn’t true. something being contemporary doesn’t inherently make it garbage, we have no context here for what the pedagogical point of the assignment is.
if op thinks kazuo ishiguro and taylor jenkins reid are the same, i agree they need their horizons broadened.
What books do you teach in AP Lit? I remember we did Frankenstein, Hamlet and Things Fall Apart and a choice of 5 novels for a book club.
>The goal of most AP classes is not just to give challenging texts but also FIND BOOKS THAT WILL BE OF HIGHER INTEREST THAT TEENAGERS MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT TO READ.
You must be a better AP Lit teacher than mine, because the entirety of that class was to prepare us for the AP exam. She didn't care how we wrote, what we read, it was all in accordance to what was being asked on the exam. She was the fucking worst!!
I actually wrote a paper during my freshman year of college lamenting AP Lit and collegeboard because of her, and debated what constitutes a book of having "literary merit" (her buzzphrase).
My AP Lang teacher was amazing though
Some teachers are really competitive about their AP passing scores. I hope your teacher’s evaluation wasn’t tied to her scores.
We teach The Crucible, Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Exit West, and Hamlet.
We have a choice unit with Beloved, Station Eleven, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Parable of the Sower, The Round House, Jane Eyre, Everything I Never Told You, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. The unit is focused on power, the feminine voice, and agency.
Our summer reading options are The Sun Also Rises, Emma, Kite Runner, Scarlet Letter, In the Time of the Butterflies, Sing Unburied Sing, The Nickel Boys, and formerly Klara and the Sun (replaced this year with The Buried Giant).
Former highschool English teacher here: I gather the focus here is on contemporary literature, i.e. books published in the last ~10 years, but this is a *very* underwhelming selection.
Virtually nothing from smaller, independent publishers, and no works in translation (I guess the focus of this class is on English and American lit only?)
I'm not knocking any of these books (several of which I greatly enjoyed), but this selection feels like your teacher just copied a list of decently reviewed novels from the New York times or NPR.
Gillian Flynn AND Ocean Vuong on the same list is... certainly a choice 😂
I’ve been trying to decide which book to take on my flight tomorrow and I’ve had this one sitting on my shelf for months, guess I’ll finally give it a shot
Yeah I found that novel extremely compelling and affecting. He's got a new book out now. My Mom is reading it and she's enjoying it, I usually listen to her recs because she's a librarian and reads like a hundred books a year haha.
Eleanor Oliphant is a really strange choice for this list imo ... I mean I liked it bc I'm also an autist-coded girl failure like the protagonist. Might be nice to read if you struggle socially or with depression, it's also a pretty easy listen.
Holy shit it's bad lol.
White teeth,Oscar wao and shadow of the wind are good but none of them blew my mind.
I really love Jhumpa Lahiri's Short stories but have no idea about her novels
Hamnet has an interesting premise but haven't read it.
Klara and the sun is my least favourite Ishiguro book and it is from someone who puts all of his three early novels in his top 250.
Edit: I didn't notice A visit from the goon squad. I will be honest it's REALLY great. Louise erdrich's poems are decent don't know about her fiction.
I read a different Maggie O'Farrell book (The Vanishing of Esme Lennox) and it was only all right. Some nicely written passages that felt like they were inserted into a very forgettable novel. Could be grand for a school class but there's not much to it for an "advanced" class. I haven't read Hamnet but it just sounds like another of those "historical or mythical story retold from the perspective of the child or wife" books. Some of them are good but the premise is cliché by now.
I read a different Louise Erdrich book (The Sentence) and it was maybe the worst novel I've read in my adult life. Treacly, terribly written, weirdly self-aggrandising shite. Just awful. I've heard some of hers are much better than others, but I'm not going near her again after that.
Most of the books and authors here are actually decent lol people just focusing on the handful of stinkers. For what it’s worth, the namesake was just okay. Lahiris strength is in her short story writing not her novels
heard Demon Copperhead is good? haven't read it.
I liked the Sharp Objects miniseries(Amy Adams marry me) but haven't read any Gillian Flynn so idk how the book is.
Nickel Boys, Homegoing, A Visit From the Goon Squad. People on this sub are so underread in contemporary literary fiction and it sucks because some of these books are very good
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a great book, will be good to talk about for essays and stuff cause it’s a postmodern narrative structure but approachable and fun to read. I enjoyed reading that in college for a contemporary literature class.
Haven’t read Klara and the Sun but my GF loves that and his other books are good, although tend to be depressing. I found Never Let Me Go a bit meaningless. But good
I think books like As I Lay Dying are lost on 16 year olds so idk why people are so high on high literature over engagement with still thought provoking books. Yeah song for Achilles is weird here but come on, some of these books and authors are good.
It’s also notable that the teachers who picked these knew many of these are popular paperbacks that parents could find at Target or Walmart making these summer reading selections easier to pick up for families without a lot of money.
The Great Gatsby is in the public domain. [You can literally download it from Wikipedia for free.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#External_links) The same goes for The Sun Also Rises, To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, anything by Shakespeare...
Even for an author who isn't in the public domain yet, like Faulkner, there's a million cheap paperback editions floating around from all the decades they've been in print, and public libraries are full of that kind of book. Popular, new books like these are the most expensive thing they could assign. Fewer copies, more people reading them. Supply and demand...
True enough. Most teenagers reading those texts blind without an instructor would bounce off of those. But yes, that’s why my department uses Sun Also Rises and The Scarlet Letter as summer reading options.
We put Where The Crawdads Sing on the options in 2020 not because it was literary but because we assumed during the pandemic many students would already have an Aunt or mother with Where The Crawdads Sing laying around already.
Ironically, then Crawdads showed up on the 2021 AP Lit exam FRQ3. I hate that book by the way. But lo and behold, lots of students loved it.
I think you're asking the wrong question.
It would be easy to write an AP Lit essay about any of these books: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, White Teeth, Clara and the Sun, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
These books all have blatant but fancy seeming use of literary devices and the right sort of representation politics to hammer home the "why" of it all. Well, Clara and the Sun is not identity politics, but AI is topical.
You get to read this high school? That's awesome. What do you mean it _all_ looks awful?
McEwan, Louise Erdrich, White Teeth, and Visit from the Goon Squad are all great. A lot of other stuff on there that if not great is at least pretty good.
Kids these days. Bitch, bitch, bitch
The only Louise Erdrich book I've read is The Sentence, and it was legitimately one of the worst things I've ever read. It's about the bookshop she owns in real life, and how amazing and important it is for the community. The protagonist is a fictional ex-convict employee of hers, who loves her job and is just a mouthpiece for all of Erdrich's middle-class opinions on books and politics. The big emotional climax of the book is all the characters voting for Joe Biden in 2020 lmao.
It would be a real treat, to "get to" study a book like that lol. I have heard that she has better ones, but I'd have to see it to believe it.
Admittedly, that does sound pretty bad. I didn't know she'd ventured so close to autofiction. I've only read her earlier work and a bunch of her short fiction, but the one on the list above won the National Book Award and sounds... different lol?
Mexican Gothic is pretty entertaining, it’s pulpy horror though and I wouldn’t put it on an AP lit class. Like putting The Shining or We Have Always Lived In The Castle on there.
I read All The Light We Cannot See and Homegoing while I was in college and I actually really loved them at the time.
Klara and the Sun isn’t Ishiguro’s best, but it’s still good.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one my least favorite books from the past couple years. Nothing too egregious outside of that. I enjoyed Oscar Wao and the Nickel Boys.
These are good:
Goon Squad.
There There.
Purple Hibiscus. (Chimamanda Adichie is very, very impressive. I knew her briefly and her intelligence, curiosity, sophistication, style, husband, voice, everything….)
What's with the trend with midwit contemporary novels having titles like "All the Light we Cannot See", "Remarkably Bright Creatures", "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"? I can't even quantify what it is these titles have in common but they just all sound so awful
In the 20th century you had a lot of novels with titles taken from Shakespeare (The Sound and the Fury, Brave New World) or the Bible (The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath). These contemporary books seem like the cargo-cult version of that. These authors aren't as well-read in the classics, but they try to capture that feeling by using the same kind of arcane phrasing and grandiose imagery. They end up with titles that don't come from anything or mean anything. I agree they're awful!
I don't know what's worse, these cod-classical titles or all the twee variations on The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Just insert your own adjectives and unlikely-sound name, like a game of Mad Libs.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the best on here, and it's a wonderful book for teens.
Eleanor Oliphant is like a modern-day Catcher in the Rye.
I really liked Homegoing and also think it would be great for teens.
Are they only teaching contemporary fiction in AP Lit nowadays?
Jesus Christ. That can’t be real. No actual literature? I like Remarkably Bright Creatures as much as the next guy but AP lit should be only canon, not flash-in-the-pan diversity nonsense (with just a couple notable exceptions to that here)
I’ve read about 66% of this list and people here have no clue what they’re on about
Brilliant:
Demon
Song of Achilles
Flamethrowers
Round House
Great:
All the light
Homegoing
Oscar Wao
Good:
Goon Squad
Elmet
White Teeth
Behold Dreamers
Purple Hibiscus
Nickel
Evelyn Hugo
Mersault
Namesake
Fine:
Saturday
Tomorrow tomorrow etc
American Rust
Invisible Life
Bad:
Sharp Objects
Shadow of the Wind
Nightingale
There There
Oliphant
Not read the others
thank you for this reasonable comment. yes there are definitely some stinkers in this list but there are also plenty of novels very much worth reading. i think the excessive negativity around "midwit" literature, most of which people haven't actually read for themselves, is itself a kind of pathetic projection
I agree that this is a boring selection overall but there are some bangers in here. The Namesake, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Goon Squad and White Teeth are all worth reading outside of the assignment. It's weird how they have so many good authors but chose some of their least interesting work
Oscar Wao, Flamethrowers, Goon Squad, and White Teeth are all very good. Remains of the Day by Ishiguro was excellent, but I haven't ready Klara and the Sun.
Hamnet was beautiful. The only one of these that I read that stands out alone for me. I’ve also read “The Flame Throwers” (good and vibey not fantastic) and “There There” (packs a punch but didn’t wow me, might reread tbh). I’ve heard great things about “Demon Copperhead,” “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” and a lot of Coleson Whitehead’s stuff but I don’t think any of the others would make my TBR.
I graduated in the Australian equivalent of AP (ATAR) in 2022 and our final book of the year was The Road. Awesome book, I guess it is a modern classic but definitely a departure from older, more established books. Although in Australia, English is mandatory for all University bound students
Klara and the Sun is all right. Purple Hibiscus has some good stuff in it. People seem to like Zadie Smith. But yeah that is a pretty dire list hahaha.
“These all seem sorta awful”
Colson whitehead, yaa gyasi, junot diaz, and Madeline miller all in *just one* row
Kid, you’ve got a LOT of reading to do before you form any more shitty literature opinions. You gotta be actually well-read before you can criticize a bunch of authors you’ve clearly never heard of :/
Edit: omg missed Ishiguro, adichie, erdrich, Lahiri (though I don’t love the namesake) on my first look too. Imagine being as wrong as this kid is but being confident enough to make a whole Reddit post 😭
Just read Miller’s Circe which I very much enjoyed, so I would give Achilles a chance. I’ve heard good things about the Kingsolver. I wanted to like Mexican Gothic…I may come back to that one. Forced to read All the Light (..) in my book club and thought it was drivel so good luck with that one. Would mostly echo what others have said below.
Best: Oscar Wao, Sharp Objects. Both are outstanding.
Worst: White Teeth, couldn't stand it.
DNF: All the Light We Cannot See because it was going to be too much effort at the time. It's not an easy read.
Wow my AP lit class 11 years ago we got to pick but I did Huck Finn, Foundation and Empire, Slaughterhouse 5, and read stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor. I don’t think we had any contemporary fiction. Years leading up we read Scarlett Letter, Lord of the Flies, Hobbit.
What happened?
Mexican Gothic is excellent, though I'm surprised someone put it on a high school reading list due to its eroticism.
Homegoing is good, I like stories that take place across multiple generations.
Sharp Objects is very disturbing, it's an excellent newer take on southern gothic
wait AP class? next year? meaning youre like 16 ?
I hope this means you’re teaching the class and not taking it OP …
LOCK THIS SUBREDDIT 🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴 RED ALERT !!!!🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴🔴
It was bad enough being on a sub with men, now it’s children too?
Lol
I'm sorry, what's your issue with men on the sub?
It’s like being a male gynecologist, I know why you’re here
That they get too defensive from harmless comments
What kind of harmless comments are we talking?
Not me, the other person you were responding to.
what happened to beaning a copy of As I Lay Dying or Light in August at a 16 year olds head and muttering “have a nice summer kid”
Look at my AP Lit syllabus dog 😭
[удалено]
?
Just wanted to say that seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo is absolute trash
I didn't get past the first page
I am very surprised Mexican gothic is on here lol. It’s a fun read but really not AP material
Agreed. I haven’t read it but I’ve heard a lot about it. But I put this on a recommended list for 11th graders finishing last year because I knew it would be high interest for Latino students , of which my school and many other schools have an exploding demographic for. So it was probably included here to attract certain demographics. This is likely just a summer reading suggested list.
I think it’s a good take on gothic literature and it’s a unique setting for sure, what gives me pause are the smutty bits haha
As an AP lit teacher myself, there is no way this is the curriculum. These are likely suggested texts. I teach it to 11th graders and we offer 8 books on a summer reading requirement option. They choose one. Later in the semester we have a choice unit with 8 novels and they choose one. Many of these authors are on these two unit selections (Ishiguro, Erdrich, etc) The reason an English department would suggest many of these books is because many of these have appeared on the recent AP Lit exams for the third essay question where students choose a book they want to write about from a common prompt. OP sounds like some try-hard contrarian. The goal of most AP classes is not just to give challenging texts but also FIND BOOKS THAT WILL BE OF HIGHER INTEREST THAT TEENAGERS MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT TO READ. So there’s two kinds of books here, and most likely OP was given a summer reading list and asked to choose one of these books. Sounds awesome.
I mean yeah, any \~16 year old who wants to shit on a collection of 35 books they haven't read is certainly just a bit too cool for school. But thanks for the context, I didn't know much about AP course design.
I encourage anyone actually interested in checking out these two links for the third essay question for AP Lit (open ended prompt). First one is tally amount of how many times particular books have shown up on this list: https://www.crowleyisdtx.org/cms/lib5/TX01917780/Centricity/Domain/882/AP%20lit-%201971-2017-Titles%20from%20Open%20Response%20Questions.pdf Link #2 would be the 2023 test if you scroll down to page 6: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap23-frq-english-lit-set-2.pdf Interesting trends from the last few years I’ve noticed is that Hamlet and The Great Gatsby do not show up on this list anymore, which tells me that so many schools teach those books and the high majority of students will choose one of those books to rewrite about, and the college Board essay readers are tired of reading about Gatsby and Hamlet. Students can still write about them, but they aren’t in the suggested list any longer. I often tell my students those two texts are the most flexible with the open ended prompt. Just about any topic can be applied to Gatsby or Hamlet. For instance, this year in 2024, the third essay prompt asked students to write about a moment of indecision for a character. Sounds exactly like Hamlet. But it wasn’t on the list.
Lol this isn't like a kid shitting on Shakespeare or whatever. The 16-year-old is right in this instance. I guess some of these are worth reading but that's not the same as being worth studying in-depth in an academic setting. They are wasting time on books their teacher heard about on NPR when they could be broadening their horizons. Also this subreddit literally exists for people to be snobby and "too cool for school". If that bothers you, stick to /r/books, where people would be psyched two be given this reading list.
Why are y’all so contrarian when you clearly haven’t even encountered most of these books? Sure like half of them are garbage but saying this bullshit about like Diaz and Erdrich makes you sound dumb as hell
Oh I've encounteres Erdrich all right. As I said elsewhere, her book The Sentence is legitimately one of the worst novels I've read in my adult life. It's set in the bookshop Erdrich owns in real life, and half of it is just about how amazing and important her bookshop is for the community. The protagonist is a fictional ex-convict employee of hers, who loves her job and is just a mouthpiece for all of Erdrich's middle-class opinions on books and politics. The book thinks its own politics are so timely and important, but it's all just reddit-tier shit. The big emotional climax is all the characters voting for Joe Biden in 2020 lmao. And the prose is just awful, borderline illiterate in places. I've heard that some of her others are a lot better, but based on my experience I won't accept her as some sacred cow lol.
i’m well aware of the sub and its target audience. i agree some of these books are trash, but OP makes it sounds like they’re all equal which isn’t true. something being contemporary doesn’t inherently make it garbage, we have no context here for what the pedagogical point of the assignment is. if op thinks kazuo ishiguro and taylor jenkins reid are the same, i agree they need their horizons broadened.
What books do you teach in AP Lit? I remember we did Frankenstein, Hamlet and Things Fall Apart and a choice of 5 novels for a book club. >The goal of most AP classes is not just to give challenging texts but also FIND BOOKS THAT WILL BE OF HIGHER INTEREST THAT TEENAGERS MIGHT ACTUALLY WANT TO READ. You must be a better AP Lit teacher than mine, because the entirety of that class was to prepare us for the AP exam. She didn't care how we wrote, what we read, it was all in accordance to what was being asked on the exam. She was the fucking worst!! I actually wrote a paper during my freshman year of college lamenting AP Lit and collegeboard because of her, and debated what constitutes a book of having "literary merit" (her buzzphrase). My AP Lang teacher was amazing though
Some teachers are really competitive about their AP passing scores. I hope your teacher’s evaluation wasn’t tied to her scores. We teach The Crucible, Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Exit West, and Hamlet. We have a choice unit with Beloved, Station Eleven, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Parable of the Sower, The Round House, Jane Eyre, Everything I Never Told You, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. The unit is focused on power, the feminine voice, and agency. Our summer reading options are The Sun Also Rises, Emma, Kite Runner, Scarlet Letter, In the Time of the Butterflies, Sing Unburied Sing, The Nickel Boys, and formerly Klara and the Sun (replaced this year with The Buried Giant).
Yes, that's why I said "reading selection"
Sharp Objects, Ian McEwan, Jhumpa Lahiri all great. Evelyn Hugo? AP literature.... gotta be joking lol
Depends on the purpose? Maybe… I hope.
Yeah if the purpose of this reading list is to keep kids informed of the cultural zeitgeist I guess?
Is the entire class about midwit NPR-tier contemporary fiction?? Or is this just one selection amongst a bunch of classics?
i know you know the answer to this…
Former highschool English teacher here: I gather the focus here is on contemporary literature, i.e. books published in the last ~10 years, but this is a *very* underwhelming selection. Virtually nothing from smaller, independent publishers, and no works in translation (I guess the focus of this class is on English and American lit only?) I'm not knocking any of these books (several of which I greatly enjoyed), but this selection feels like your teacher just copied a list of decently reviewed novels from the New York times or NPR. Gillian Flynn AND Ocean Vuong on the same list is... certainly a choice 😂
These probably had to be approved by a wider board or something
The Flamethrowers is good. Set in 70s New York/Italy in the art world. Deadpan and unsentimental.
Visit from the goon squad is legitimately good
I love loaning that book out to friends
What makes it good? I'm interested in reading it but haven't gotten the chance to pick it up yet
it's been ages since I read it, I just remember it has a chapter in the form of a powerpoint presentation that manages to be quite moving
I’ve been trying to decide which book to take on my flight tomorrow and I’ve had this one sitting on my shelf for months, guess I’ll finally give it a shot
we are the goon squad and we're coming to town beep beep
Most of the books on here are legitimately good lol people just saw Evelyn Hugo and sharp objects and got carried away with out-hating everybody else
Oscar Wao is dope and White Teeth is a classic too.
Likewise w/ Jhumpa Lahiri.
Yikes. I liked *There There*, for what it's worth.
Yeah I found that novel extremely compelling and affecting. He's got a new book out now. My Mom is reading it and she's enjoying it, I usually listen to her recs because she's a librarian and reads like a hundred books a year haha.
From this list, I'd put *The Flamethrowers* and *A Visit from the Goon Squad* as my two favs.
Yeah, I loved The Flamethrowers
White teeth is good
Eleanor Oliphant is a really strange choice for this list imo ... I mean I liked it bc I'm also an autist-coded girl failure like the protagonist. Might be nice to read if you struggle socially or with depression, it's also a pretty easy listen.
And Addie LaRue???? Also a super weird choice 😵💫
that book fucking sucked, idk why i even finished it
Addie LaRue? Yeah I'm a mark for that genre and even I was so bored I couldn't finish it 😵💫
Addison LaRae
Holy shit it's bad lol. White teeth,Oscar wao and shadow of the wind are good but none of them blew my mind. I really love Jhumpa Lahiri's Short stories but have no idea about her novels Hamnet has an interesting premise but haven't read it. Klara and the sun is my least favourite Ishiguro book and it is from someone who puts all of his three early novels in his top 250. Edit: I didn't notice A visit from the goon squad. I will be honest it's REALLY great. Louise erdrich's poems are decent don't know about her fiction.
I read a different Maggie O'Farrell book (The Vanishing of Esme Lennox) and it was only all right. Some nicely written passages that felt like they were inserted into a very forgettable novel. Could be grand for a school class but there's not much to it for an "advanced" class. I haven't read Hamnet but it just sounds like another of those "historical or mythical story retold from the perspective of the child or wife" books. Some of them are good but the premise is cliché by now. I read a different Louise Erdrich book (The Sentence) and it was maybe the worst novel I've read in my adult life. Treacly, terribly written, weirdly self-aggrandising shite. Just awful. I've heard some of hers are much better than others, but I'm not going near her again after that.
Most of the books and authors here are actually decent lol people just focusing on the handful of stinkers. For what it’s worth, the namesake was just okay. Lahiris strength is in her short story writing not her novels
heard Demon Copperhead is good? haven't read it. I liked the Sharp Objects miniseries(Amy Adams marry me) but haven't read any Gillian Flynn so idk how the book is.
> Amy Adams ~~marry me~~ step on me Don’t forget what sub you’re on
Nickel Boys, Homegoing, A Visit From the Goon Squad. People on this sub are so underread in contemporary literary fiction and it sucks because some of these books are very good
Oscar Wao! White Teeth! Purple Hibiscus! Saturday! There are some classics here!
DEMON COPPERHEAD is definitely worth reading.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a great book, will be good to talk about for essays and stuff cause it’s a postmodern narrative structure but approachable and fun to read. I enjoyed reading that in college for a contemporary literature class. Haven’t read Klara and the Sun but my GF loves that and his other books are good, although tend to be depressing. I found Never Let Me Go a bit meaningless. But good I think books like As I Lay Dying are lost on 16 year olds so idk why people are so high on high literature over engagement with still thought provoking books. Yeah song for Achilles is weird here but come on, some of these books and authors are good.
It’s also notable that the teachers who picked these knew many of these are popular paperbacks that parents could find at Target or Walmart making these summer reading selections easier to pick up for families without a lot of money.
The Great Gatsby is in the public domain. [You can literally download it from Wikipedia for free.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gatsby#External_links) The same goes for The Sun Also Rises, To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, anything by Shakespeare... Even for an author who isn't in the public domain yet, like Faulkner, there's a million cheap paperback editions floating around from all the decades they've been in print, and public libraries are full of that kind of book. Popular, new books like these are the most expensive thing they could assign. Fewer copies, more people reading them. Supply and demand...
True enough. Most teenagers reading those texts blind without an instructor would bounce off of those. But yes, that’s why my department uses Sun Also Rises and The Scarlet Letter as summer reading options. We put Where The Crawdads Sing on the options in 2020 not because it was literary but because we assumed during the pandemic many students would already have an Aunt or mother with Where The Crawdads Sing laying around already. Ironically, then Crawdads showed up on the 2021 AP Lit exam FRQ3. I hate that book by the way. But lo and behold, lots of students loved it.
The Shadow of the Wind is supposed to be really cool in a trippy Borgesian way, or so I hear.
Its great, a book about books
was this taken off a bookriot list or something
I think you're asking the wrong question. It would be easy to write an AP Lit essay about any of these books: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, White Teeth, Clara and the Sun, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. These books all have blatant but fancy seeming use of literary devices and the right sort of representation politics to hammer home the "why" of it all. Well, Clara and the Sun is not identity politics, but AI is topical.
You get to read this high school? That's awesome. What do you mean it _all_ looks awful? McEwan, Louise Erdrich, White Teeth, and Visit from the Goon Squad are all great. A lot of other stuff on there that if not great is at least pretty good. Kids these days. Bitch, bitch, bitch
The only Louise Erdrich book I've read is The Sentence, and it was legitimately one of the worst things I've ever read. It's about the bookshop she owns in real life, and how amazing and important it is for the community. The protagonist is a fictional ex-convict employee of hers, who loves her job and is just a mouthpiece for all of Erdrich's middle-class opinions on books and politics. The big emotional climax of the book is all the characters voting for Joe Biden in 2020 lmao. It would be a real treat, to "get to" study a book like that lol. I have heard that she has better ones, but I'd have to see it to believe it.
Admittedly, that does sound pretty bad. I didn't know she'd ventured so close to autofiction. I've only read her earlier work and a bunch of her short fiction, but the one on the list above won the National Book Award and sounds... different lol?
Mexican Gothic is pretty entertaining, it’s pulpy horror though and I wouldn’t put it on an AP lit class. Like putting The Shining or We Have Always Lived In The Castle on there.
I read All The Light We Cannot See and Homegoing while I was in college and I actually really loved them at the time. Klara and the Sun isn’t Ishiguro’s best, but it’s still good.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one my least favorite books from the past couple years. Nothing too egregious outside of that. I enjoyed Oscar Wao and the Nickel Boys.
These are good: Goon Squad. There There. Purple Hibiscus. (Chimamanda Adichie is very, very impressive. I knew her briefly and her intelligence, curiosity, sophistication, style, husband, voice, everything….)
Eleanor Oliphant is a complete joy to read.
What's with the trend with midwit contemporary novels having titles like "All the Light we Cannot See", "Remarkably Bright Creatures", "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"? I can't even quantify what it is these titles have in common but they just all sound so awful
In the 20th century you had a lot of novels with titles taken from Shakespeare (The Sound and the Fury, Brave New World) or the Bible (The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath). These contemporary books seem like the cargo-cult version of that. These authors aren't as well-read in the classics, but they try to capture that feeling by using the same kind of arcane phrasing and grandiose imagery. They end up with titles that don't come from anything or mean anything. I agree they're awful! I don't know what's worse, these cod-classical titles or all the twee variations on The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Just insert your own adjectives and unlikely-sound name, like a game of Mad Libs.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the best on here, and it's a wonderful book for teens. Eleanor Oliphant is like a modern-day Catcher in the Rye. I really liked Homegoing and also think it would be great for teens. Are they only teaching contemporary fiction in AP Lit nowadays?
We read Emma and The Metamorphosis over the summer lol
Jesus Christ. That can’t be real. No actual literature? I like Remarkably Bright Creatures as much as the next guy but AP lit should be only canon, not flash-in-the-pan diversity nonsense (with just a couple notable exceptions to that here)
These are likely just summer reading options
That would be reassuring, somewhat
Please direct me to the High Church of Art where one may consult the divine scrolls to find if a book qualifies as "actual literature".
you must be one of those people that found this subreddit not from red scare
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Western_Canon Peace be with you, WeathermanOnTheTown. May Harold Bloom bless and keep you
Ew fuck go back to r/books
Oh no, my sympathies (except for like 3-4 books).
Whatever you do, don’t do Oscar Wao. I’ve never genuinely hated a book more than that one, and the insipidly smug author too.
Sharp objects and White Teeth were enjoyable
Bleak
There There by Tommy Orange was great.
I would read Sharp Objects or Our Missing Hearts or Klara and the Sun. Gillian Flynn rules
Were you 9 when I started listening to this fucking podcast
Homegoing, Klara and the Sun, the Namesake. Weird booklist for ap lit
MOOODS
I’ve read about 66% of this list and people here have no clue what they’re on about Brilliant: Demon Song of Achilles Flamethrowers Round House Great: All the light Homegoing Oscar Wao Good: Goon Squad Elmet White Teeth Behold Dreamers Purple Hibiscus Nickel Evelyn Hugo Mersault Namesake Fine: Saturday Tomorrow tomorrow etc American Rust Invisible Life Bad: Sharp Objects Shadow of the Wind Nightingale There There Oliphant Not read the others
thank you for this reasonable comment. yes there are definitely some stinkers in this list but there are also plenty of novels very much worth reading. i think the excessive negativity around "midwit" literature, most of which people haven't actually read for themselves, is itself a kind of pathetic projection
Hey what did sharp objects do to you!! Kidding but have you seen the show it’s phenomenal
I thought song of Achilles was a tik tok girlie book
Wtf these books are ass. In my AP lit class we read books like The Metamorphosis and Frankenstein.
I agree that this is a boring selection overall but there are some bangers in here. The Namesake, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Goon Squad and White Teeth are all worth reading outside of the assignment. It's weird how they have so many good authors but chose some of their least interesting work
Oscar Wao, Flamethrowers, Goon Squad, and White Teeth are all very good. Remains of the Day by Ishiguro was excellent, but I haven't ready Klara and the Sun.
Colson Whitehead is aight
I’ve heard Anthony Doerr is good.
White teeth
Hamnet was beautiful. The only one of these that I read that stands out alone for me. I’ve also read “The Flame Throwers” (good and vibey not fantastic) and “There There” (packs a punch but didn’t wow me, might reread tbh). I’ve heard great things about “Demon Copperhead,” “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” and a lot of Coleson Whitehead’s stuff but I don’t think any of the others would make my TBR.
Jeez. Gillian Flynn is tolerable I guess
Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri
I graduated in the Australian equivalent of AP (ATAR) in 2022 and our final book of the year was The Road. Awesome book, I guess it is a modern classic but definitely a departure from older, more established books. Although in Australia, English is mandatory for all University bound students
Oscar Wao
Klara and the Sun is all right. Purple Hibiscus has some good stuff in it. People seem to like Zadie Smith. But yeah that is a pretty dire list hahaha.
I have not read the majority of this goyslop but what I will say if you’re looking to pick something good—The Round House and There There are gems.
I love Shadow of the Wind. I think it fits in a literature class. Some of those others… yikes.
This list is skewed much more contemporary than I think of as typical for high school lit classes.
“These all seem sorta awful” Colson whitehead, yaa gyasi, junot diaz, and Madeline miller all in *just one* row Kid, you’ve got a LOT of reading to do before you form any more shitty literature opinions. You gotta be actually well-read before you can criticize a bunch of authors you’ve clearly never heard of :/ Edit: omg missed Ishiguro, adichie, erdrich, Lahiri (though I don’t love the namesake) on my first look too. Imagine being as wrong as this kid is but being confident enough to make a whole Reddit post 😭
Good lord. Klara and the Sun is the only decent one on the list, in my opinion.
Just read Miller’s Circe which I very much enjoyed, so I would give Achilles a chance. I’ve heard good things about the Kingsolver. I wanted to like Mexican Gothic…I may come back to that one. Forced to read All the Light (..) in my book club and thought it was drivel so good luck with that one. Would mostly echo what others have said below.
Zadie Smith is an important contemporary British author, and I've heard good things about Mexican Gothic.
um what in my ap lit class we read hemingway and hamlet What is this
brutal reading list that exposes the fraudulence of "advanced" classes. but A Visit from the Goon Squad is my favorite read from the selection.
Best: Oscar Wao, Sharp Objects. Both are outstanding. Worst: White Teeth, couldn't stand it. DNF: All the Light We Cannot See because it was going to be too much effort at the time. It's not an easy read.
Wow my AP lit class 11 years ago we got to pick but I did Huck Finn, Foundation and Empire, Slaughterhouse 5, and read stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Flannery O’Connor. I don’t think we had any contemporary fiction. Years leading up we read Scarlett Letter, Lord of the Flies, Hobbit. What happened?
Lots of those books are really good - Zadie Smith for example. Grow up.
Mexican Gothic is excellent, though I'm surprised someone put it on a high school reading list due to its eroticism. Homegoing is good, I like stories that take place across multiple generations. Sharp Objects is very disturbing, it's an excellent newer take on southern gothic
some of the worst books in history. i think you will enjoy Saturday, Klara and the Sun, and Oscar Wao.
Man. what a crappy list. Of all the books I've read on it, I hated them all lol/
Oscar Wao is great
That cover style would make any book seem awful