LibGuides: Summer Reading 2023: Rising 9th Graders

Required Summer Reading for English

Required 9th Grade Summer Reading

Your summer reading assignment is in two parts.

PART ONE: GRAPHIC NOVEL of HOMER’S ODYSSEY

1. Read Gareth Hind’s graphic novel based on Homer’s Odyssey and make a hand-written list of characters.

2. When you are finished, choose your favorite ten characters and either

a. provide an image (from a magazine or the internet) of a contemporary actor who you would hire to play each character in your imagined movie version of The Odyssey;

b. make your own drawings of what you imagine each character would look like in your graphic novel of the epic.

PART TWO: YOUR CHOICE OF THE FOLLOWING BOOKS (See below for descriptions of each of the books.)

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García-Márquez

True Grit by Charles Portis

The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston

Read one, or more, of the books listed above. As you read, mark words and passages for the written part of this assignment. Use sticky notes if it’s a borrowed copy or pencil if it’s your own book. Use a digital marker if you are reading an e-book. Write your notes by hand!

1. Three Passages

Copy—by hand—three short passages that strike you in some way. It might be that you find the language beautiful, the idea bewildering, the sentiment maddening, or the thought perfectly captured.

2. Three Words

Look up the definitions of three words. Write down the words and their definitions.

3. Three Questions

Write three questions you have about the book.

DUE DATE: Your list and images of ten characters from The Odyssey and your three passages, words, and questions about the book of your choice are due at your first English 9 class in September.

Homer's The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds
"Fresh from his triumphs in the Trojan War, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wants nothing more than to return home to his family. Instead, he offends the sea god, Poseidon, who dooms him to years of shipwreck and wandering. Battling man-eating monsters, violent storms, and the supernatural seductions of sirens and sorceresses, Odysseus will need all his strength and cunning—and a little help from Mount Olympus—to make his way home and seize his kingdom from the schemers who seek to wed his queen and usurp his throne. Award-winning graphic artist Gareth Hinds masterfully reinterprets a story of heroism, adventure, and high action that has been told and retold for more than 2,500 years—though never quite like this. With bold imagery and an ear tuned to the music of Homer's epic poem, Gareth Hinds reinterprets the ancient classic as it's never been told before."
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu
"Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution for a new start in the United States. Now he finds himself running a failing grocery store in a poor African-American section of Washington, D.C., his only companions two fellow African immigrants who share his bitter nostalgia and longing for his home continent. Years ago and worlds away Sepha could never have imagined a life of such isolation. As his environment begins to change, hope comes in the form of a friendship with new neighbors Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter. But when a series of racial incidents disturbs the community, Sepha may lose everything all over again."
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
"As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal."
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
"In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.
Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty."
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
"A modern classic, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, the eccentric and remote sister of their dead mother.
The family house is in the small town of Fingerbone on a glacial lake in the Far West, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere."
Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transcience."
Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez
"In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal."
True Grit by Charles Portis
"True Grit tells the story of Mattie Ross, who is just fourteen when the coward Tom Chaney shoots her father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robs him of his life, his horse, and $150 in cash. Mattie leaves home to avenge her father's blood. With one-eyed Rooster Cogburn, the meanest available U.S. Marshal, by her side, Mattie pursues the killer into Indian Territory. True Grit is eccentric, cool, straight, and unflinching, like Mattie herself. From a writer of true status, this is an American classic through and through."
The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
"As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present."