University High SchoolChoose Your Own Summer Reading

(Kind Of)

Two quotes formed the inspiration behind University High School’s 2015 Summer Reading assignment.

The first is a question asked in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the 2014 Summer Reading novel: “If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?”

The second is an observation in the introduction to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:

Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.

Each of these excerpts speaks to one of the great struggles of literature, the challenge of the individual to find his or her way in relationship to the surrounding world. The question of how we conduct ourselves as unique creatures in collaborative systems has been one to which writers and artists continually return. An analysis of this theme will provide a framework for the 2015-16 school year at University. From the ways in which we honor the individual in the systems of our school, to how we work in teams for athletics or groups in the classroom, to the ways in which we partner with others in programs like the Year of Service, students and faculty will examine the relationship between the individual and society in several ways throughout the school year.

Because there are so many books, both fiction and non-fiction, that can speak to this topic, the faculty has created a list from which students can choose one book to serve as an entry point for this discussion. Students are, of course, welcome to read more than one book, but they should choose only one group to join for discussion at the start of the year.

In order to properly plan for space and staffing, we are asking that each student identify the book they have chosen via an online survey by August 3.

Questions to Guide Your Reading

1. Who is the central figure in the book? What is his/her background? What relationships or roles (family, work, neighborhood, faith, etc.) may influence the options they have and the decisions they make?

2. In what ways do those relationships/roles help the figure in his/her journey?

3. In what ways do those relationships/roles hurt or limit the figure in his/her journey?

4. Compared to where he or she began, what has changed for the figure over the course of the book?

5. Can you state in one sentence what the author of this book most wanted you (the reader) to learn from it?

The Assignment Select one book from the list on the back side of this flyer.

Read the book this summer.

Come to school in August ready to discuss the book.

2015 Summer Reading Selections (Choose One)Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Jacqueline Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up African-American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls) Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were their curse and their salvation. As the family dysfunction escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents’ betrayals and, finally, found

the resources and will to leave home.

Unbroken* (Laura Hillenbrand)In boyhood, Louis Zamperini was an incorrigible delinquent. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that carried him to the Berlin Olympics. But when World War II began, the athlete became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed

flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft.

Wonder (R.J. Palacio) August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face.

White Tiger* (Aravind Adiga)The white tiger of this novel is Balram Halwai, a poor Indian villager whose great ambition leads him to the zenith of Indian business culture, the world of the Bangalore entrepreneur. On the occasion of the president of China’s impending trip to Bangalore, Balram writes a letter to him describing his

transformation and his experience as driver and servant to a wealthy Indian family, which he thinks exemplifies the contradictions and complications of Indian society.

Red Scarf Girl (Ji-li Jiang)It’s 1966, and 12-year-old Ji-li Jiang has everything she could want: brains, friends, and a bright future in Communist China. But it’s also the year that China’s leader, Mao Ze-dong, launches the Cultural Revolution—and Ji-li’s world begins to fall apart. People who were once her friends and neighbors turn on her and

her family, forcing them to live in constant fear of arrest. When Ji-li’s father is imprisoned, she faces the most difficult dilemma of her life.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Janisse Ray)Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in

religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South.

A Girl Named Zippy (Haven Kimmel) When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of 300 people. Nicknamed “Zippy” for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-

town America was caught in the amber of the innocent post-war period–people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday, and kept barnyard animals in their backyards.

The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros) The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous—it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become.

Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny)In Lord of Light, Earth is long since dead. On a colony planet, a band of men has gained control of technology, made themselves immortal, and now rules their world as the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Only one dares oppose them: he who was once Siddhartha and is now Mahasamatman.

Binder of Demons. Lord of Light.

Longitude (Dava Sobel)Lacking the ability to measure their longitude, sailors throughout the great ages of exploration had been literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. One man, John Harrison, in complete opposition to the scientific community, dared to imagine a mechanical solution—a clock

that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had ever been able to do on land. Longitude is the dramatic human story of an epic scientific quest and of Harrison’s forty-year obsession with building his perfect timekeeper, known today as the chronometer.

A Hope in the Unseen (Ron Suskind)It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou,

Cedric eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition—which is fully supported by his forceful mother—is to attend a top-flight college. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously

transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The Beautiful Struggle (Ta-Nehisi Coates)Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African

civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.

Note: Descriptions are from Amazon.com. Titles marked with an asterisk (*) have been identified by the faculty as containing more mature themes.