Honors Independent Novel Options

1
Honors Independent Novel Options

• Each of these titles has appeared on the AP
  Literature test at least twice!

2
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

• Joyce's semi-autobiographical chronicle of
  Stephen Dedalus' passage from university student
  to "independent" artist is at once a richly
  detailed, amusing, and moving coming-of-age
  story, a tour de force of style and technique,
  and a profound examination of the Irish psyche
  and society.

3
Catch 22

• It is set in the closing months of World War II,
  in an American bomber squadron on a small island
  off Italy. Its hero is a bombardier named
  Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because
  thousands of people he hasn't even met keep
  trying to kill him. (He has decided to live
  forever even if he has to die in the attempt.)

4
Pride and Prejudice

• This timeless satire on English manners traces
  the fortunes and foibles of a family of
  marriageable young women and their suitors. In
  early nineteenth-century England, a spirited
  young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish
  gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements
  of her four sisters.

5
The Color Purple

• Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell
  the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at
  age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her
  father and attempting to protect her sister from
  the same fate, and continuing over the course of
  her marriage to "Mister," a brutal man who
  terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her
  abusive husband has been keeping her sister's
  letters from her and the rage she feels, combined
  with an example of love and independence provided
  by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally
  toward an awakening of her creative and loving
  self.

6
Jude the Obscure

• The story of a man of high ideals but lowly
  background, who throws himself into a seemingly
  endless fight against the conventions of his time
  who finds himself torn between two women the
  seductive, scheming Arabella the intelligent,
  iconoclastic Sue.

7
Lord Jim

• A tale of seafaring adventure into a subtle study
  of the meaning of honor and courage, loyalty and
  betrayal. When Jim, an idealistic merchant seaman
  and ships officer, abandons the supposedly
  sinking Patna and its passengers, he dashes his
  youthful dreams of glory in a single stroke.
  Condemned in court for his impetuous act of
  cowardice, Jim relegates himself to a life
  roaming the Far East.

8
Passage to India

• A group of English visitors want to see the
  real India, and in Dr. Aziz they find a highly
  civilized companion. During a visit to the
  Marabar caves, one of the women accuses Dr. Aziz
  of sexually assaulting her, triggering a chain of
  events that will change the lives of people on
  both sides of this complex conflict. Arguably
  Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India
  transforms the personal into the political.

9
As I Lay Dying

• At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren
  family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury
  Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each
  family member including Addie and others
  along the way tell their private responses to
  Addie's life.

10
Cry, the Beloved Country

• Published in 1948, Cry, the Beloved Country is a
  beautifully told and profoundly compassionate
  story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his
  son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing
  South Africa.

11
Farewell to Arms

• The best American novel to emerge from World War
  I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story
  of an American ambulance driver on the Italian
  front and his passion for a beautiful English
  nurse.

12
Moll Flanders

• One of the most determined, energetic, and lusty
  heroines in all of English literature, Daniel
  Defoes Moll Flanders will do anything to avoid
  poverty. Born in Newgate Prison, she was for
  twelve years a whore, five times a wife (once to
  her own brother), twelve years a thief, and eight
  years a transported felon in Virginia before
  finally escaping from the life of immorality and
  wickedness imposed on her by society. She is as
  much a survivor, and just as resourceful, as
  Defoes other great literary creation, Robinson
  Crusoe.

13
1984

• Winston Smith is a low-ranking member of the
  ruling Party in London, in the nation of Oceania.
  Everywhere Winston goes, even his own home, the
  Party watches him through telescreens everywhere
  he looks he sees the face of the Party's
  seemingly omniscient leader, a figure known only
  as Big Brother. The Party controls everything in
  Oceania, even the people's history and language.
  Currently, the Party is forcing the
  implementation of an invented language called
  Newspeak, which attempts to prevent political
  rebellion by eliminating all words related to it.
  Even thinking rebellious thoughts is illegal.
  Such thoughtcrime is, in fact, the worst of all
  crimes.

14
Song of Solomon

• Song of Solomon is perhaps a lyrical novel that
  follows Milkman Dead as he struggles to
  understand his family history and the ways in
  which that history has both been damaged by and
  transcended the horror of slavery. All of
  Morrison's fiction, from her first novel, The
  Bluest Eye (1970), to Paradise (1998), explores
  both the need for and the impossibility of real
  community and the bonds that both unite and
  divide African-American women.

15
To the Lighthouse

• The novel is one of Woolf's most successful and
  accessible experiments in the stream-of-consciousn
  ess style. The three sections of the book take
  place between 1910 and 1920 and revolve around
  various members of the Ramsay family during
  visits to their summer residence on the Isle of
  Skye in Scotland. A central motif of the novel is
  the conflict between the feminine and masculine
  principles at work in the universe.
• With her emotional, poetic frame of mind, Mrs.
  Ramsay represents the female principle, while Mr.
  Ramsay, a self-centered philosopher, expresses
  the male principle in his rational point of view.
  Both are flawed by their limited perspectives. A
  painter and friend of the family, Lily Briscoe,
  is Woolf's vision of the androgynous artist who
  personifies the ideal blending of male and female
  qualities. Her successful completion of a
  painting that she has been working on since the
  beginning of the novel is symbolic of this
  unification.

16
Brave New World

• Huxleys vision of the future in his astonishing
  1931 novel Brave New World -- a world of tomorrow
  in which capitalist civilization has been
  reconstituted through the most efficient
  scientific and psychological engineering.

17
Sons and Lovers

• Sons and Lovers is rich with universal truths
  about relationships moreover, it brims with what
  Alfred Kazin has called Lawrence's "magic
  sympathy, between himself and life." Continues
  Mr. Kazin "No other writer of his imaginative
  standing has in our time written books that are
  so open to life...Since for Lawrence the great
  subject of literature was not the writer's own
  consciousness but consciousness between people,
  the living felt relationship between them, it was
  his very concern to represent the 'shimmer' of
  life, the 'wholeness'...that made possible his
  brilliance as a novelist." With an Introduction
  by John Gross
• Sons and Lovers is one of the landmark novels of
  the twentieth century. It was immediately
  recognized as the first great modern restatement
  of the oedipal drama when it appeared in 1913 and
  is widely considered the major work of D. H.
  Lawrence's early period.

18
Age of Innocence

• When the Countess Ellen Olenska returns from
  Europe, fleeing her brutish husband, her
  rebellious independence and passionate awareness
  of life stir the educated sensitivity of Newland
  Archer, already engaged to be married to her
  cousin May Welland, "that terrifying product of
  the social system he belonged to and believed in,
  the young girl who knew nothing and expected
  everything." As the consequent drama unfolds,
  Edith Wharton's sharp ironic wit and Jamesian
  mastery of form create a disturbingly accurate
  picture of men and women caught in a society that
  denies humanity while desperately defending
  "civilization".

19
Bless Me Ultima

• Chicano literature in English. Antonio Marez is
  six years old when Ultima enters his life. She is
  a curandera, one who heals with herbs and magic.
  'We cannot let her live her last days in
  loneliness,' says Antonio's mother. 'It is not
  the way of our people,' agrees his father. And so
  Ultima comes to live with Antonio's family in New
  Mexico. Soon Tony will journey to the threshold
  of manhood. Always, Ultima watches over him. She
  graces him with the courage to face childhood
  bigotry, diabolical possession, the moral
  collapse of his brother, and too many violent
  deaths. Under her wise guidance, Tony will probe
  the family ties that bind him, and he will find
  in himself the magical secrets of the pagan
  pasta mythic legacy equally as palpable as the
  Catholicism of Latin America in which he has been
  schooled.

20
Bluest Eye

• It is the story of eleven-year-old Pecola
  Breedlove - a black girl in an America whose love
  for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate
  all others - who prays for her eyes to turn blue
  so that she will be beautiful, so that people
  will look at her, so that her world will be
  different. This is the story of the nightmare at
  the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its
  fulfillment.

21
Fathers and Sons

• Fathers and Sons shows the timeless cycle of
  intergenerational rebellion and the resulting
  alientation of the generations. Written at the
  time of the emancipation of the Russian serfs, it
  deals with a self-proclaimed liberal father and
  his son, who under the influence of his brilliant
  friend, dismisses his father's liberal virtues as
  sentimentality.

22
Go Tell It On the Mountain

• With lyrical precision, psychological directness,
  and a rage that is at once unrelenting and
  compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a
  fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of
  his identity as the stepson of the minister of a
  storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one
  Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of
  his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral
  struggle of self-invention opened new
  possibilities in the American language and in the
  way Americans understand themselves.

23
Love Medicine

• The first book in Louise Erdrich's Native
  American series tells the story of two
  familiesthe Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Written
  in Erdrich's uniquely poetic, powerful style,
  Love Medicine springs to raging life a
  multigenerational portrait of new truths and
  secrets whose time has come, of strong men and
  women caught in an unforgettable drama of anger,
  desire, and the healing power that is Love
  Medicine.

24
The Sun Also Rises

• It is the story of a group of 'Lost Generation'
  Americans and Brits in the 1920s on a sojourn
  from Paris to Pamploma, Spain. The novel
  poignantly details their life as expatriates on
  Paris' Left Bank, and conveys the brutality of
  bullfighting in Spain. The novel established
  Hemingway as one of the great prose stylists of
  all time.

25
The Power and the Glory

• Graham Greene explores corruption and atonement
  through a priest and the people he encounters. In
  the 1930s one Mexican state has outlawed the
  Church, naming it a source of greed and
  debauchery. The priests have been rounded up and
  shot by firing squad--save one, the whiskey
  priest. On the run, and in a blur of alcohol and
  fear, this outlaw meets a dentist, a banana
  farmer, and a village woman he knew six years
  earlier. The police are closing in. But
  compassion and humanity impel him toward his
  destiny.

26
Lesson Before Dying

• Set in a small Cajun community in the late 1940s,
  A Lesson Before Dying is an "enormously moving"
  ("Los Angeles Times") novel of one man condemned
  to die for a crime he did not commit and a young
  man who visits him in his cell. In the end, the
  two men forge a bond as they both come to
  understand the simple heroism of resisting--and
  defying--the expected. Winner of the National
  Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

27
My Antonia

• Widely recognized as Willa Cathers greatest
  novel, My Ántonia is a soulful and rich portrait
  of a pioneer womans simple yet heroic life. The
  spirited daughter of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia
  must adapt to a hard existence on the desolate
  prairies of the Midwest. Enduring childhood
  poverty, teenage seduction, and family tragedy,
  she eventually becomes a wife and mother on a
  Nebraska farm. A fictional record of how women
  helped forge the communities that formed a
  nation, My Ántonia is also a hauntingly eloquent
  celebration of the strength, courage, and spirit
  of Americas early pioneers.

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Time to Decide!

• Visit the MCHS library, a local public library,
  or your local bookstore to get your book!
• Also, remember to fill out and get your
  permission slip signed and returned ASAP!