LibGuides: Summer Reading 2024: Rising 8th Graders

The titles are all hyper linked to our Sora library. If you would like to borrow the digital copy, please do so. If you are planning to buy a print copy, you may use the provided links to read a description and sample of the book. Please ❌ DO NOT click Borrow ❌ if you just want to read a sample. There is a separate ✅ READ SAMPLE ✅ button. Thank you for being thoughtful stewards of our collection.

2024 Required Summer Reading for Rising 8th Graders

All required books are provided by the school through P&T Knitwear. We recommend calling ahead (212-546-7536) to make sure they have the titles in stock and set aside for you before going to the store. Once there, please show your Friends Seminary ID and they will bill the school for your required reading purchases.

1. For your summer reading assignment, you will read two books listed on the following pages. The list includes novels, non-fiction books, and short story collections. At least one of the books you read should be a novel. The second book can be another novel, a non-fiction book, or a book of short stories. As you read, mark, highlight and underline passages that catch your attention or words that are unfamiliar. If you are reading a borrowed book, take notes on sticky notes placed throughout the book.

2. Additionally, for each book you should complete the post-reading worksheets in this packet.

This packet will be collected on the first day of school.

On LibGuides, you’ll be able to access required and optional summer reading materials through Sora. We encourage you to make use of this amazing resource throughout the summer.

However, you MUST bring your own hard copy of the required reading with you on the first day of school in September. We expect you to have read and annotated that physical copy of the book you selected for your required summer reading.

You are welcome to make use of any edition or version of the optional readings that you can get your hands on.

Please keep in mind that even if you rush home and read the text tonight, you should still give yourself time to review it in the days immediately before school begins. The first day will be better for everyone if the text is fresh in your mind.

The packet you need to open and review is right here: 2024 Required Summer Reading for Rising 8th Graders

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
ISBN: 1643753282
Publication Date: 2022-08-16
In The Book of Delights, one of today's most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay's funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend's unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgement between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world-his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis. The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.
The Chosen by Chaim Potok
ISBN: 1501142461
Publication Date: 2022-01-11
It's the spring of 1944 and fifteen-year-olds Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders have lived five blocks apart all their lives. But they've never met, not until the day an accident at a softball game sparks an unlikely friendship. Soon these two boys – one expected to become a Hasidic rebbe, the other at ease with secular America – are drawn into one another's worlds despite a father's strong opposition. Set against the backdrop of World War II and the creation of the state of Israel, The Chosen is a poignant novel about transformation and tradition, growing up and growing wise, and finding yourself--even if it might mean disappointing those you love.
Educated by Tara Westover
ISBN: 0399590528
Publication Date: 2022-02-08
Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
ISBN: 9780679734772
Publication Date: 1991-04-03
The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. "In English my name means hope," she says. "In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous – Cisneros's masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time.
The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi
ISBN: 9781400078752
Publication Date: 2006-04-11
Jessamy "Jess" Harrison, age eight, is the child of an English father and a Nigerian mother. Possessed of an extraordinary imagination, she has a hard time fitting in at school. It is only when she visits Nigeria for the first time that she makes a friend who understands her: a ragged little girl named TillyTilly. But soon TillyTilly's visits become more disturbing, until Jess realizes she doesn't actually know who her friend is at all. Drawing on Nigerian mythology, Helen Oyeyemi presents a striking variation on the classic literary theme of doubles -- both real and spiritual -- in this lyrical and bold debut.
If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo
ISBN: 1250078415
Publication Date: 2018-06-26
Amanda Hardy is the new girl in school. Like anyone else, all she wants is to make friends and fit in. But Amanda is keeping a secret, and she's determined not to get too close to anyone. But when she meets sweet, easygoing Grant, Amanda can't help but start to let him into her life. As they spend more time together, she realizes just how much she is losing by guarding her heart. She finds herself yearning to share with Grant everything about herself, including her past. But Amanda's terrified that once she tells him the truth, he won't be able to see past it.
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
ISBN: 0143038095
Publication Date: 2006-09-21
Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue. With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.
Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner; Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Introduction by)
ISBN: 9781999944810
Publication Date: 2018-10-31
In Kingdoms of Elfin Sylvia Townsend Warner explores the morals, domestic practices, politics and passions of Elfins. She follows their affairs with mortals, and their daring flights across the North Sea. The Kingdoms of Brocéliande in France, Zuy in the Low Countries, Gedanken in Austria and Blokula in Lappland entertain Ambassadors, hunt with wolves, and rear changelings for the courtiers' amusement. Enter a world where the fairy ruling classes are charming and insolent, and all levels of fairy society are heartless, in human terms. But love and hate strike at fairies of all ranks, as do poverty and the passions of the heart. Enter Elfindom with care.
Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist; Michael Hofmann (Translator)
ISBN: 0811228347
Publication Date: 2020-03-31
Michael Kohlhaas has been wronged. First his finest horses were unfairly confiscated and mistreated. And things keep going worse--his servants have been beaten, his wife killed, and the lawsuits he pursues are stymied--but Kohlhaas, determined to find justice at all costs, tirelessly persists. Standing up against the bureaucratic machine of the empire, Kohlhaas becomes an indomitable figure that you can't help rooting for from start to finish. Knotty, darkly comical, magnificent in its weirdness, and one of the greatest and most influential tales in German literature, this short novel, first published in German in 1810, is now available in award-winning Michael Hofmann's sparkling new English translation.
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
ISBN: 0062662813
Publication Date: 2020-04-07
Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers--especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami's determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club, she doesn't know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can't stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
The Promise by Silvina Ocampo; Suzanne Jill Levine (Translator); Jessica Powell (Translator)
ISBN: 0872867714
Publication Date: 2019-11-05
A dying woman's attempt to recount the story of her life reveals the fragility of memory and the illusion of identity. A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life – a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade tumultuously through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism.
Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo; Daniel Balderston (Translator); Jorge Luis Borges (Preface by); Helen Oyeyemi (Introduction by)
ISBN: 1590177673
Publication Date: 2015-01-27
An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century's great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer "better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us." Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, "Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature." Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world's most individual and finest.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
ISBN: 0060935464
Publication Date: 2005-07-05
Voted America's Best-Loved Novel in PBS's The Great American Read Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South--and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the most cherished stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than forty million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father--a crusading local lawyer--risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller
ISBN: 1501160346
Publication Date: 2021-04-06
David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake--which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life's work was shattered. Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world. When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool--a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet. Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don't Exist is a wondrous fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.

Middle School students are asked to read a book over the summer in preparation for their goLEAD class next year. These grade-specific books will ground students in the social justice themes that will be explored in the coming school year in goLEAD. Students should read their assigned book before returning to school in September; parents are encouraged to read with their child! Books are available at P & T Knitwear.

Miles Morales: Spider-Man by Jason Reynolds
ISBN: 1484788508
Publication Date: 2018-10-02
Miles Morales is just your average teenager. Dinner every Sunday with his parents, chilling out playing old-school video games with his best friend, Ganke, crushing on brainy, beautiful poet Alicia. He's even got a scholarship spot at the prestigious Brooklyn Visions Academy. Oh yeah, and he's Spider Man. But lately, Miles's spidey-sense has been on the fritz. When a misunderstanding leads to his suspension from school, Miles begins to question his abilities. After all, his dad and uncle were Brooklyn jack-boys with criminal records. Maybe kids like Miles aren't meant to be superheroes. Maybe Miles should take his dad's advice and focus on saving himself. As Miles tries to get his school life back on track, he can't shake the vivid nightmares that continue to haunt him. Nor can he avoid the relentless buzz of his spidey-sense every day in history class, amidst his teacher's lectures on the historical benefits of slavery and the modern-day prison system. But after his scholarship is threatened, Miles uncovers a chilling plot, one that puts his friends, his neighborhood, and himself at risk. It's time for Miles to suit up.