Senior English/Honors Senior English

Novel Choice Unit resources

Each of the titles listed below is available at the Northwood High School Library.
Provided summaries come from Goodreads.com.
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton (F PAT)
Cry, the Beloved Country, the most famous and important novel in South Africas history,
was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Patons impassioned novel about a
black mans country under white mans law is a work of searing beauty.
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not
love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his
fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not
be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a
mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.
Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo
and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial
injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the
Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the
dignity of man.

Beowulf, unknown (829 B)

Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Northern epic of
a heros triumphs as a young warrior and his fated death as a defender of his people. The
poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on,
physically and psychically exposed in the exhausted aftermath. It is not hard to draw
parallels in this story to the historical curve of consciousness in the twentieth century, but
the poem also transcends such considerations, telling us psychological and spiritual truths
that are permanent and liberating.

The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (F HOS)

Amir is the son of a wealthy Kabul merchant, a member of the ruling caste of Pashtuns.
Hassan, his servant and constant companion, is a Hazara, a despised and impoverished
caste. Their uncommon bond is torn by Amir's choice to abandon his friend amidst the
increasing ethnic, religious, and political tensions of the dying years of the Afghan
monarchy, wrenching them far apart. But so strong is the bond between the two boys that
Amir journeys back to a distant world, to try to right past wrongs against the only true friend
he ever had.
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy
and the son of his fathers servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a
country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price
of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers
over sonstheir love, their sacrifices, their lies.

The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (F CON)

Dark allegory describes the narrators journey up the Congo River and his meeting with,
and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants
of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological
penetration.

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway (F HEM)

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the war to end all wars. He volunteered for
ambulance service in Italy, was wounded, and twice decorated. Out of his experiences
came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the
fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer, and the men and
women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of
war. In it, Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising
passion.

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (F VON)

Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a
man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet
Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously
through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as
an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.
Slaughterhouse-Five is not only Vonnegut's most powerful book, it is also as important as
any written since 1945. Like Catch- 22, it fashions the author's experiences in the Second
World War into an eloquent and deeply funny plea against butchery in the service of
authority. Slaughterhouse-Five boasts the same imagination, humanity, and gleeful
appreciation of the absurd found in Vonnegut's other works, but the book's basis in rockhard, tragic fact gives it a unique poignancy - and humor.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller (F HEL)

At the heart of Catch-22 resides the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero
endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war. His problem is

Colonel Cathcart, who keeps raising the number of missions the men must fly to complete
their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous
missions that he's committed to flying, he's trapped by the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, the
bureaucratic rule from which the book takes its title: a man is considered insane if he
willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes the necessary formal
request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he's
sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (F BRA)

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source
of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage.
Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a
lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy
society to preserve and read books.
Bradburys powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of
technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to
dazzle and shock.

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (821.17 CHA)

The procession that crosses Chaucer's pages is as full of life and as richly textured as a
medieval tapestry. The Knight, the Miller, the Friar, the Squire, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath,
and others who make up the cast of characters -- including Chaucer himself -- are real
people, with human emotions and weaknesses. When it is remembered that Chaucer wrote
in English at a time when Latin was the standard literary language across western Europe,
the magnitude of his achievement is even more remarkable. But Chaucer's genius needs no
historical introduction; it bursts forth from every page of The Canterbury Tales.

If we trust the General Prologue, Chaucer intended that each pilgrim should tell two tales
on the way to Canterbury and two tales on the way back. He never finished his enormous
project and even the completed tales were not finally revised. Scholars are uncertain about
the order of the tales. As the printing press had yet to be invented when Chaucer wrote his
works, The Canterbury Tales has been passed down in several handwritten manuscripts.

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Ken Kesey (F KES)

In this classic of the 1960s, Ken Kesey's hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, a boisterous,
brawling, fun-loving rebel who swaggers into the world of a mental hospital and takes over.
A lusty, life-affirming fighter, McMurphy rallies the other patients around him by challenging
the dictatorship of Nurse Ratched. He promotes gambling in the ward, smuggles in wine and
women, and openly defies the rules at every turn. But this defiance, which starts as a sport,
soon develops into a grim struggle, an all-out war between two relentless opponents: Nurse
Ratched, back by the full power of authority, and McMurphy, who has only his own
indomitable will. What happens when Nurse Ratched uses her ultimate weapon against
McMurphy provides the story's shocking climax.

The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells (F WEL)

This masterpiece of science fiction is the fascinating story of Griffin, a scientist who creates
a serum to render himself invisible, and his descent into madness that follows.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (F AUS)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune
must be in want of a wife." So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty comedy of
manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized
sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out
their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin (F CHO)

When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment
of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic
fiction were taken aback by Chopin's daring portrayal of a woman trapped in a stifling
marriage, who seeks and finds passionate physical love outside the confines of her domestic
situation.
Aside from its unusually frank treatment of a then-controversial subject, the novel is
widely admired today for its literary qualities. Edmund Wilson characterized it as a work
"quite uninhibited and beautifully written, which anticipates D. H. Lawrence in its treatment
of infidelity." Although the theme of marital infidelity no longer shocks, few novels have
plumbed the psychology of a woman involved in an illicit relationship with the perception,
artistry, and honesty that Kate Chopin brought to The Awakening.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath (F PLA)

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly
going undermaybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia
Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her
insanity becomes palpably real, even rationalas accessible an experience as going to the
movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human
psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic.

Native Son, Richard Wright (F WRI)

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for
assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story
of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a
brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing
reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities
across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (F FAU)

The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the
most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy;
haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives
fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the characters voices and actions mesh to
create what is arguably Faulkners masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the
twentieth century.

As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner (F FAU)

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's harrowing account of the Bundren family's odyssey across
the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told in turns by each of the
family membersincluding Addie herselfthe novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to
the deepest pathos.

The Color Purple, Alice Walker (F WAL)

Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on the life of women of color in
the southern United States in the 1930s, addressing numerous issues including their
exceedingly low position in American social culture.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (F BRO)

Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime
at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity.
She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and
discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to
portray a woman's passionate search for a wider and richer life than Victorian society
traditionally allowed. With a heroine full of yearning, the dangerous secrets she encounters,
and the choices she finally makes, Charlotte Bronte's innovative and enduring romantic
novel continues to engage and provoke readers.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (F HUX)

Far in the future, the World Controllers have created the ideal society. Through clever use
of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational sex and drugs, all its members are
happy consumers. Bernard Marx seems alone harboring an ill-defined longing to break free.
A visit to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations, where the old, imperfect life still
continues, may be the cure for his
distress...

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy (F ROY)

"They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who
should be loved and how. And how much."
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, fraternal twins
Esthappen and Rahel fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is

their family. Their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu, (who loves by night the man her children
love by day), fled an abusive marriage to live with their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who
plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical
Marxist, bottom-pincher), and their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent
grandaunt). When Chacko's English ex-wife brings their daughter for a Christmas visit, the
twins learn that things can change in a day, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even
cease forever, beside their river...

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (F DIC)

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 20 monthly installments
between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels,
containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and subplots in his entire canon.
At the novel's core is long-running litigation in England's Court of Chancery, Jarndyce v
Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. The litigation, which already
has taken many years and consumed between 60,000 and 70,000 in court costs, is
emblematic of the failure of Chancery.
Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticised Dickens's portrait of Chancery as
exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated
in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood/Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Marjane

Satrapi (F SAT)
Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a
large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions
between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high
school years in Vienna facing the trials of adolescence far from her family; of her
homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her
beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and
familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal
trials and joys of growing up.

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (F STE)

First published in 1939, Steinbecks Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression
chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm
family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised
land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of
an America divided into haves and have-nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet
majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately
stirring in its human dignity.
A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one mans fierce
reaction to injustice, and of one womans stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of
the Great Depression and probes the very nature of equality and justice in America.
Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of
the Republic be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the bookwhich takes its title
from the first verse: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
As Don DeLillo has claimed, Steinbeck shaped a geography of conscience with this novel
where there is something at stake in every sentence. Beyond thatfor emotional urgency,
evocative power, sustained impact, prophetic reach, and continued controversyThe
Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most American of American classics.

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger (F SAL)

"...the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy
childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all
that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the
truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have
about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been
synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his
sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds
edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. His constant wry observations
about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually
exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (F SHE)

Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein when she was only eighteen. At once a Gothic
thriller, a passionate romance, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of
science, Frankenstein tells the story of committed science student Victor Frankenstein.
Obsessed with discovering the cause of generation and life and bestowing animation upon
lifeless matter, Frankenstein assembles a human being from stolen body parts but; upon
bringing it to life, he recoils in horror at the creature's hideousness. Tormented by isolation
and loneliness, the once-innocent creature turns to evil and unleashes a campaign of
murderous revenge against his creator, Frankenstein.
Frankenstein, an instant bestseller and an important ancestor of both the horror and
science fiction genres, not only tells a terrifying story, but also raises profound, disturbing
questions about the very nature of life and the place of humankind within the cosmos: What
does it mean to be human? What responsibilities do we have to each other? How far can we
go in tampering with Nature? In our age, filled with news of organ donation genetic
engineering, and bio-terrorism, these questions are more relevant than ever.

A Separate Peace, John Knowles (F KNO)

Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A
Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is
a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What
happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of
these boys and their world.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X (B X)

In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published in 1964, Malcolm
X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life
and the growth of the Black Muslim movement to veteran writer and journalist Alex Haley .
In a unique collaboration, Haley worked with Malcolm X for nearly two years, interviewing,
listening to, and understanding the most controversial leader of his time.
Raised in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm Little journeyed on a road to fame as astonishing
as it was unpredictable. Drifting from childhood poverty to petty crime, Malcolm found
himself in jail. It was there that he came into contact with the teachings of a little-known
Black Muslim leader renamed Elijah Muhammad. The newly renamed Malcolm X devoted
himself body and soul to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the world of Islam,
becoming the Nations foremost spokesman. When his conscience forced him to break with
Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity to reach African
Americans across the country with an inspiring message of pride, power, and selfdetermination.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X defines American culture and the African American
struggle for social and economic equality that has now become a battle for survival.
Malcolms fascinating perspective on the lies and limitations of the American Dream, and the
inherent racism in a society that denies its nonwhite citizens the opportunity to dream, gives
extraordinary insight into the most urgent issues of our own time.

Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin (975 G)

In the Deep South of the 1950s, journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross the color
line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged
life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. His
audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity-that
in this new millennium still has something important to say to every American.

I am Malala: The Girl who Stood up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban,
Malala Yousafzai (970.82 YOU)
I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after
midday. When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out.
Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday,
October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in
the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her
to survive.
Instead, Malala's miraculous recovery has taken her on an extraordinary journey from a
remote valley in northern Pakistan to the halls of the United Nations in New York. At sixteen,
she has become a global symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest-ever Nobel Peace
Prize laureate.
I Am Malala is the remarkable tale of a family uprooted by global terrorism, of the fight
for girls' education, of a father who, himself a school owner, championed and encouraged his
daughter to write and attend school, and of brave parents who have a fierce love for their
daughter in a society that prizes sons. I Am Malala will make you believe in the power of one
person's voice to inspire change in the world.