Magruder High School – Mr. Ornstein, Mr. Gifford

Read the following three books. They are easy to find at libraries, used book stores, retail book stores and online sites such as amazon.com. We recommend that each student own copies of the books for the AP Literature and Composition class and underline, highlight or otherwise annotate his or her experiences with each work. Owning the text, and annotating it, will prove very helpful when the student needs to review a dozen or more works of literature before the College Board’s AP exam in May.

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. It’s a love story. It’s a war story. Romance has to find new avenues of expression when artillery rains down on Europe’s young men and women. The confusion, chaos and camaraderie of combat make an unusual backdrop for a story of the attraction between two people whose profession is, at least on the surface, devoted to healing. Hemingway’s prose mixes lavish attention to small details with irony and a willingness to push the reader to fill in missing pieces of the emotional puzzles.

Fences by August Wilson. Can you admire a leading man whose life is marked by bitterness, stubbornness, hypocrisy and adultery? Can you understand when the frustration of his own unresolved dreams leads him to shut the door on his son’s dreams? A master playwright’s series of dramas present a justly revered vision of the 20^th century African American experience.  Fences focuses on a time in mid-century when opportunities are real enough to taste, but too slippery to hold.

Richard III by William Shakespeare. The second-best villain in all of Shakespeare schemes, plots, maneuvers and sweet-talks his way to the throne, leaving a trail of shattered lives and drawing an army of opponents to a final, fateful battle. Richard feels purpose-built for war and ill-suited for peace. His monstrous ambition and razor-sharp wit make for a riveting story to set on Shakespeare’s Elizabethan stage. [Shopping note: Select an edition (such as the Folger) that offers helpful notes on vocabulary and on the historical background such as the York-vs.-Lancaster power struggle in the play. Avoid what publishers call “parallel text” editions that have a complete “translation” into modern English text on the page opposite Shakespeare’s original.]

What should you look for while reading?

• In each work, you will find one or more external, physical symbols that the author uses to illuminate something deep in the core of the main character.
• In each work, pay careful attention to the motivation of the principal characters: Why, at any given moment, are they pursuing the things they pursue? A character’s motivation may change over time.
• In each work, dig for subtext. Authors use dozens of literary tools to create a rich universe of meanings underneath the plots of their plays and novels. Plot can be condensed to fit onto an index card (or into a blurb on the book’s back cover). Subtext is a larger and less readily condensed element of literature, and it is a vital component of the magical potion that makes a work of literature worth reading again and again.