Suggested Reading List Grades 9-12 – Pearson Connexus Support

This list has been compiled from several sources including the American Library Association, the International Reading Association, and state reading lists when available. The books on this list are not required reading, nor is this intended to be an all-inclusive list. Parents and teachers are encouraged to review the selections to ensure the appropriateness for individual students.

Fiction

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Farm Team – Will Weaver
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Make Lemonade – Virginia Wolff
Look Homeward, Angel – Thomas Wolfe
Bearstone – Will Hobbs
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
The Fifth Child – Doris Lessing
The Chosen – Chaim Potok
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
Death Be Not Proud – John Gunther
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
My Antonia – Willa Cather
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest Gaines
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants – Ann Brashares
Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
Tangerine – Edward Bloor
Define Normal – Julie Anne Peters
The Chocolate War – Robert Cormier
Freak the Mighty – Rodman Philbrick
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

Fantasy and Folklore

Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Harry Potter Series – J.K. Rowling
Little House on the Prairie – Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Pearl – John Steinbeck
The Raven and other poems – Edgar Allan Poe
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Ceremony – Leslie Silko
The Dream Keeper and Other Poems – Langston Hughes
The Princess Bride – William Goldman
Dandelion Wine – Ray Bradbury
The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
Dragonsong – Anne McCaffrey
The Once and Future King – T.H. White
Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was – Barry Hughart
Go and Come Back – Joan Abelove
The United States of Poetry – Joshua Blum, Bob Holman and Mark Pellington
Aria of the Sea – Dia Calhoun
Walking on Solid Ground – Shu Pui Cheung, Shuyuan Li, Aaron Chau, and Deborah Wei
Jump Up and Say! A Collection of Black Storytelling – Linda Goss and Clay Goss, editors
Snow in August – Pete Hamill

Historical Fiction

The Boxer – Kathleen Karr
Kiss The Dust – Elizabeth Laird
Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton
Tortilla Flat – John Steinbeck
Two Suns In The Sky – Miriam Bat-Ami
Crispin: The Cross of Lead – Avi
The Book of the Lion – Michael Cadnum
The Playmaker – J.B. Cheaney
The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Killer Angels – Michael Shaara

Science Fiction

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Tomorrow’s Sphinx – Clare Bell
Finder: A Novel of Borderlands – Emma Bull
The Night Room – E.M. Goldman
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat – Harry Harrison
Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
The Game of Sunken Places – M.T. Anderson
1984 – George Orwell
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea – Jules Verne
The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories – Isaac Asimov
2001 A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Watership Down – Richard Adams

Poetry

Nine Horses – Billy Collins
New and Selected Poems – Gary Soto
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004 – Adrienne Rich
The Rose That Grew From Concrete – Tupac Shakur
People on the Bridge – Wislawa Szymborska
In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry – Ethelbert Miller
The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998 – Nikki Giovanni
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
Collected Poems – T.S. Elliot
The Collected Poems – Sylvia Plath
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson
Spoon River Anthology – Edgar Lee Masters

Nonfiction

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard
The Power of Myth – Joseph Campbell
The Tao of Pooh – Benjamin Hoff
The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding – Michael Brooke
At The Buzzer – Byran Burwell
Boy – Roald Dahl
Into Thin Air – John Krakauer
Into the Wild – John Krakauer
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
The Closing of the American Mind – Allan Bloom
Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa – Mark Mathabane
Autobiography of a Face – Lucy Grealy
Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog – John Grogan
Days of Grace – Arthur Ashe and Arnold Rampersad
Between a Rock and a Hard Place – Aron Ralston
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – Joanne Greenberg
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts – Maxine Hong Kingston
The Way to Rainy Mountain – N. Scott Momaday
Profiles in Courage – John F. Kennedy
Black Boy – Richard Wright
Farewell to Manzanar – Jeanne Houston and James Houston
Barrio Boy – Ernesto Galarza
It’s Not About the Bike – Lance Armstrong
Fast Food Nation – Eric Schlosser
Madame Curie – Eve Curie
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America – Barbara Ehrenreich

Drama

Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekov
Macbeth – William Shakespeare
A Midsummer’s Night Dream – William Shakespeare
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand
Twelve Angry Men – Reginald Rose
A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen

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