Most of these books are available at the Chicago Public Library and at Borders. Please complete the required reading and select one book from the General Summer Reading list to read over the summer.

Assignments surrounding the two summer readings will follow in the upcoming 2009-2010 school year. Enjoy your summer, and your summer reading!

Freshman Required Reading

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros - told in a series of vignettes of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. This novel can be read in one week.

Sophomore Required Reading

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, is a post-modern anti-war science fiction novel dealing with a soldier's experiences during World War II and his journeys with time travel.

General Summer Reading

Choose at least one of these:

Fiction Books

• Kindred, by Octavia Butler
• Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
• Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemmingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
• Batman: The Long Halloween, by Jeph Leob and Tim Sale
• Holler if You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students, by Gregory Michie
• The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
• 19 Minutes, by Jodi Picoult
• Compete Tales and Poems, by Edger Allan Poe
• Maus, by Art Spiegelman
• The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams

Nonfiction Books

• Columbine, by Dave Cullen
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, by Langston Hughes
• There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz
• The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride
• Night, by Elie Wiesel
• Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X