Dear Students,

To begin, I want to wish you a Happy New Year! I hope that you are enjoying your break and are getting the restorative opportunities in order to enter the second semester with great investment and fervor. Below you will see the list of outside reading books you may choose from. Once you do your research and peruse a few authors and pages, please feel free to email me your first and second choice. You will have until Friday, January 11th, to make your choices. Once your book has been recorded, you will have the opportunity to prepare individually or within a group that has chosen the same book. Presentations will begin on Monday, February 11th, and will end on Friday, February 22nd. On that same Friday, a new list of outside reading books will be posted, along with new dates for choosing and presenting. Please note that many of the titles from this first list will also be available for the second outside reading assignment. Feel free to email me with any questions or if you want me to make some individual suggestions for you. And finally, I hope you’re enjoying East of Eden (my favorite book [along with One Hundred Years of Solitude]), as it will be a critical text that propels us into the 2nd semester. Onward!      

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
White Noise by Don DeLillo
Light in August by William Faulkner
Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner                                                                                  As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Jazz by Toni Morrison
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (Please note that I may end up teaching this book, so if this is one of your two choices, add a third choice).