Summer Reading – Sophomores and Juniors

Students preparing to enter their Sophomore or Junior year at Delmarva Christian High School are required to select from the following lists of literature and complete the writing assignment described below. Students may select:

1. five short stories and five poems by five different poets
2. one novel and five short stories (or)
3. five poems by five poets and one novel

Then they are to write a two-page (500-600-word) essay in APA format comparing and contrasting the themes of two works. Theme is defined by The Bedford Introduction to Literature as: “The central meaning or dominant idea in a literary work. A theme provides a unifying point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a work are organized.”

Summer Reading Short Stories and Authors

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Young Goodman Brown
The Minister’s Black Veil
Wakefield
The Birthmark

Herman Melville

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The Story of the Good Little Boy

Bret Harte

The Outcasts of Poker Flat

Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Kate Chopin

The Story of an Hour

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Yellow Wallpaper

Willa Cather

A Wagner Matinee
Paul’s Case

Hamlin Garland

Under the Lion’s Paw

Stephen Crane

Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind
A Man Said to the Universe
An Open Boat

Jack London

To Build a Fire

James Joyce

Eveline

O. Henry

The Ransom of Red Chief

Ernest Hemingway

Soldier’s Home
Big Two-Hearted River

William Faulkner

A Rose for Emily

Frank Stockton

The Lady, or the Tiger?

Summer Reading Poets

William Shakespeare
John Donne
Ben Johson
John Milton
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Christina Rossetti
Thomas Hardy
William Butler Yeats
Dylan Thomas
Edgar Allan Poe
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Greenleaf Whittier
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Edgar Lee Masters
Robert Frost
Carl Sandburg
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Seamus Heaney
John Donne’s Holy Sonnets

Summer Reading Novels

The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
When Crickets Cry, Charles Martin
Peace Like a River, Leif Enger
Redeeming Love, Francine Rivers
The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Billy Budd, Herman Melville