Teen Reading Lists
All students are required to read two books from the list for the grade they will enter in the fall. Honors students are required to read three books rated 3 or 4.
The number in parentheses indicates the degree of difficulty of each book. The numbers mean:
1. a book slightly easier than grade level
2. a book typical of the reading ability of the grade level
3. a book slightly higher than grade level
4. a difficult book - You should be a good reader with the persistence to finish a lengthy book.
Grade 7
The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle - Avi (1-2)
(required for all students)
Plus one of the following:
War Comes to Willy Freeman - James Collier & Christopher Collier (1)
The Adoration of Jenna Fox - Mary Pearson (1) c. 2008
Stargirl - Jerry Spinelli (2)
Homecoming - Cynthia Voigt (2)
Rumble Fish - S.E. Hinton (2)
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm - Nancy Farmer (2)
The Thief Lord - Cornelia Funke (3)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Agatha Christie (3)
Redwall - Brian Jacques (3)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith (4)
Golden Compass - Philip Pullman (4)
Grade 8
The Contender - Robert Lipsyte (1)
Cut - Patricia McCormick (1)
Jake, Reinvented - Gordon Korman (2)
The ABC Murders - Agatha Christie (2)
No Promises in the Wind - Irene Hunt (2)
White Darkness - Geraldine McCaughrean (2)
What I Saw and How I Lied - Judy Blundell (2)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglass Adams (3)
(any book in the series)
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (3)
State of Fear - Michael Crichton (4)
Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier (4)
Marjorie Morningstar - Herman Wouk (4)
Grade 9
Big Mouth and Ugly Girl - Joyce Carol Oates (1)
Click - Nick Hornby and Nine Others (1)
Maus I and Maus II - Art Spiegelman (1-2)
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien (2)
Songs for a Teenage Nomad - Kim Culbertson (2)
Through the Burning Steppe - Elena Kozhina (2-3)
The Last Shot: City Streets and Basketball Dreams - Darcy Frey (2-3)
The Color of Water - James McBride (3)
My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok (3)
Elsewhere - Gabrielle Zevin (3)
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (4)
The Iliad - Homer (4)
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (4)
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (4)
(unabridged version)
Grade 10
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (1)
Monster - Walter Dean Meyers (1)
The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros (1-2)
Montana 1948 - Larry Watson (2)
The Color Purple - Alice Walker (2-3)
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien (2-3)
Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal - Mal Peet (2-3)
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway (2-3)
The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls (2-3)
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (3)
Slaughter-House Five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (3)
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver (4)
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (4)
(required for Honors students)
Martin Eden - Jack London (4)
(required for Honors students)
Grade 11
To Sir, With Love - E.R. Braithwaite (1)
Regeneration - Pat Barker (1)
Born on a Blue Day - Daniel Tammet (1)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (2)
Dracula - Bram Stoker (2)
Cry, The Beloved Country - Alan Paton (2)
The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai (3)
Howard's End - E.M. Forster (3)
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (3)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (3)
1984 - George Orwell (3)
(required for Honors students)
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift (4)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (4)
The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles (4)
Grade 12
Naked - David Sedaris (1)
Life Class - Pat Barker (1)
The Old Man and The Sea - Ernest Hemingway (1)
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2)
Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2)
Persuasion - Jane Austen (2)
The Road - Cormac McCarthy (2)
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (3)
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (3)
The Stranger - Albert Camus (3)
Sula - Toni Morrison (3)
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf (4)
(required for AP students)
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (4)
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (4)
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides (4)
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