LibGuides: Summer Reading 2024: Rising 9th Graders

Required Summer Reading for 9th Grade

Required 9th Grade Summer Reading

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 copy.

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 days of English class will be more engaging for everyone if the text is fresh in your mind.

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.

Required 9th Grade Summer Reading

Your summer reading assignment is in two parts.

PART ONE: Read Gareth Hind’s Adaptation of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
1. Read Gareth Hind’s two graphic novels based on Homer’s epic poems—The Iliad and The
Odyssey.
2. Choose your favorite ten characters from The Iliad and The Odyssey, and

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

b.) 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 epics.

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 Iliad and 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 Iliad by Gareth Hinds (Illustrator)
ISBN: 0763696633
Publication Date: 2019-03-12
More than three thousand years ago, two armies faced each other in an epic battle that rewrote history and came to be known as the Trojan War. The Iliad, Homer's legendary account of this nine-year ordeal, is considered the greatest war story of all time and one of the most important works of Western literature. In this stunning graphic novel adaptation -- a thoroughly researched and artfully rendered masterwork -- renowned illustrator Gareth Hinds captures all the grim glory of Homer's epic. Dynamic illustrations take readers directly to the plains of Troy, into the battle itself, and lay bare the complex emotions of the men, women, and gods whose struggles fueled the war and determined its outcome. This companion volume to Hinds's award-winning adaptation of The Odyssey features notes, maps, a cast of characters, and other tools to help readers understand all the action and drama of Homer's epic.

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
Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, 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 transience.
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."