TBS Library Lady

Summer Training

2006-05-31T10:33:00.000-07:00

Start running June 18th! Post once a week with what you have done and how the running felt.

12th Grade summer reading

2006-05-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

Here are your choices
Everyone The Color Purple Walker, Alice
AP Lit Ceremony Silko, Leslie

Pick 2 of these 4

Deliverance Dickey, James

Canoes and canoeing--Horror fiction--Adventure--Georgia--Fiction

Four men set out for a remote river on a white-water canoeing adventure that turns to a nightmare when they are forced to struggle against man and nature for survival.

Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut, Kurt

World War, 1939-1945--Time travel--War stories--Historical--Fiction

This anti-war novel focuses on the firebombing of Dresden, and follows Billy Pilgrim as he comes unstuck in time and jumps back and forth in his life with no control over where he is going next. In the end he learns he must concentrate on the good things and ignore the bad in life.

The Poisonwood Bible Kingsolver, Barbara

Missionaries--Congo (Democratic Republic)--History--1960-1997--Family--Fiction.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it--from garden seeds to Scripture--is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Interpreter of Maladies Lahiri, Jhumpa

East Indian Americans--Social life and customs--Fiction.

Traveling from India to New England and back again, Lahiri charts the emotional voyages of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations, cultures, religions, and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of both Indian and American cultures, they also speak with universal eloquence and compassion to everyone who has ever felt like an outsider. Lahiri translates between the ancient traditions of her ancestors and the sometimes baffling prospects of the New World.

Everything is illuminated : a novel Foer, Jonathan Safran

Americans--Ukraine--World War, 1939-1945--Ukraine--Grandfathers--Fiction.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man -- also named Jonathan Safran Foer -- sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

11th grade summer reading

2006-05-02T09:33:00.001-07:00

Her are your choices
Everyone My Name is Asher Lev
AP Language Cry, the Beloved Country

Pick 2 of these 4

A Lesson Before Dying Gaines, Ernest J.

African American men--Louisiana--Death row inmates--Friendship-Fiction.

No breathless courtroom triumphs or dramatic reprieves alleviate the sad progress toward execution in this latest novel by the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Bantam, 1982). The condemned man is Jefferson, a poorly educated man/child whose only crimes are a dim intelligence, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and being black in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s. To everyone, even his own defense attorney, he's an animal, too dumb to understand what is happening to him. But his godmother, Miss Emma, decides that Jefferson will die a man. To accomplish just that, she brings Grant Wiggins, the teacher at the plantation's one-room school and narrator of the novel, into the story. Emotionally blackmailed by two strong-willed old ladies, Grant reluctantly begins visiting Jefferson, committing both men to the painful task of self-discovery.

Ender'’s Game Card, Orson Scott

Genetic engineering--Science fiction.

Andrew "Ender" Wiggin thinks he is playing computer simulated war games; he is, in fact, engaged in something far more desperate. The result of genetic experimentation, Ender may be the military genius Earth desperately needs in a war against an alien enemy seeking to destroy all human life. The only way to find out is to throw Ender into ever harsher training, to chip away and find the diamond inside, or destroy him utterly. Ender Wiggin is six years old when it begins. He will grow up fast.

A Raisin in the Sun Hansberry, Lorraine,

African Americans--History--20th century--Drama.

A Raisin in the Sun portrays a few weeks in the life of the Youngers, an African-American family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. When the play opens, the Youngers are about to receive an insurance check for $10,000. This money comes from the deceased Mr. Younger's life insurance policy. Each of the adult members of the family has an idea as to what he or she would like to do with this money. The matriarch of the family, Mama, wants to buy a house to fulfill a dream she shared with her husband. Mama's son, Walter Lee, would rather use the money to invest in a liquor store with his friends. He believes that the investment will solve the family's financial problems forever. Walter's wife, Ruth, agrees with Mama, however, and hopes that she and Walter can provide more space and opportunity for their son, Travis. Finally, Beneatha, Walter's sister and Mama's daughter, wants to use the money for her medical school tuition. She also wishes that her family members were not so interested in joining the white world. Beneatha instead tries to find her identity by looking back to the past and to Africa.

The Last Report of the Miracles at Little No Horse Erdrich, Louise (AP only)

Ojibwa Indians--Impostors and imposture--Priests--Fiction.

For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Compelled to his task by a direct mystical experience, Father Damien has made enormous sacrifices, and experienced the joys of commitment as well as deep suffering. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. He imagines the undoing of all that he has accomplished -- sees unions unsundered, baptisms nullified, those who confessed to him once again unforgiven. To complicate his fears, his quiet life changes when a troubled colleague comes to the reservation to investigate the life of the perplexing, difficult, possibly false saint Sister Leopolda. Father Damien alone knows the strange truth of Sister Leopolda's piety, but these facts are bound up in his own secret. In relating his history and that of Leopolda, whose wonder working is documented but inspired, he believes, by a capacity for evil rather than the love of good. This is the seventh in a series of works by Louise Erdich that chronicles life on an Ojibwa reservation called Little No Horse.

10th grade summer reading choices

2006-05-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Here your choices for summer.
Everyone APrayer of Owen Meany Irving, John
Honors The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Pick 2 of these 4

A Farewell to Arms Hemmingway, Ernest

World War, 1914-1918--Fiction.

The best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto -- of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized -- is one of the greatest moments in literary history. A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was 30 years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.

The Glass Menagerie

Young men--Family--Missouri--Saint Louis--Drama.

The play is set in St. Louis in 1937, and deals with the troubled relationship between an aging mother, Amanda Wingfield, and her painfully shy daughter Laura Wingfield, as told by the son and brother, Tom Wingfield, who is supposedly recalling events from his memory. He states that the play is not completely realistic, because "memory takes much poetic license." Amanda is fixated on her idealized version of her Southern childhood, recalling days when as many as seventeen gentleman callers would visit her. Her husband, described as a "telephone man who fell in love with long distance," abandoned the family when Tom and Laura were children. Laura has a slight physical handicap: she wore a brace in high school, and has a slight limp now. She has become cripplingly shy as a result. The outside world frightens her. She prefers the comfort of her collection of glass animals and the sounds of her father's old records. Although Tom provides financial support working long hours in a shoe warehouse (a job he hates), Amanda sees Tom as a "selfish dreamer" who irresponsibly retreats into movies, alcohol, and novels instead of doing more to provide for the family.

The Natural Malamud, Bernard

Baseball players--United States--Fiction.

Considered by many to be the greatest baseball novel ever written, this classic morality tale features one of the most memorable characters in all of literature, Roy Hobbs -- a talented athlete whose promising career is derailed by a youthful indiscretion. When Roy makes a comeback as an aging player, his struggle to achieve greatness in the midst of recreant temptations becomes the subject of an epic story about our national need for heroes and our simultaneous desire to see them fail.

The Lovely Bones Sebold, Alice

Teenage girls--Crimes against--Murder victims' families--Psychological fiction.

When we first meet Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. As she looks down from that strange new place she tells us, in the fresh and spirited voice of a fourteen-year-old, a tale that is both haunting and full of hope. Susie watches life continuing after her brutal death: her loved ones holding out hope she'll be found, her killer covering his tracks. As months pass without leads, she sees her family contorted by loss. With compassion, longing, and a growing understanding, she sees them face the worst -- then, in time, pass through grief and begin to mend.

9th grade Summer Reading choices

2006-05-02T09:19:00.001-07:00

You have to choose 2 out of these 4 plus the required Power of One by Courtenay, Bryce

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou, Maya

African American women authors--20th century--Biography.

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou describes her coming of age as a precocious but insecure black girl in the American South during the 1930s and subsequently in California during the 1940s. Maya’s parents divorce when she is only three years old and ship Maya and her older brother, Bailey, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in rural Stamps, Arkansas. Superbly told, with the poet's gift for language and observation, Angelou's autobiography of her childhood in Arkansas - a world of which most Americans are ignorant.

Master and Commander

Great Britain--History, Naval--19th century--Fiction.

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

The Secret Life of Bees

Teenage girls--African American women--Sisters--South Carolina--Fiction.

Lily Owens has shaped her life around one devastating, blurred, memory-the afternoon her mother was killed, when Lily was four. Since then, her only real companion on the peach farm of her harsh, unyielding father has been a fierce-hearted black woman, Rosaleen, her "stand-in mother." When Rosaleen insults three of the deepest racits in town, Lily knows it is time to spring them both free. She and Rosaleen take off for a town called Tiburon, South Carolina, a name she found on the back of a picture amid the few possessions left by her mother. They are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters. Lily enters their mesmerizing secret world of bees and honey, and of the Black Madonna who presides over this household of strong, wise women-a place where ultimately she can find the single thing her heart longs for most.

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

Forced labor--Soviet Union--Communism--Fiction

The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.

Read it yet?

2006-04-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

This blog will be for book reviews by me and you. Share a great book, make recommendations, comment on others recommendations. Reading is THE best way to prepare for SAT, ACT and college. So get reading!