You have had 12 years of education; trust your brains and your interpretations. The beauty of literature is discovering what it means to you.

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1 You have had 12 years of education; trust your brains and your interpretations. The beauty of literature is discovering what it means to you. Hello Future World Literature Students! I am so excited that you will be joining the ranks of my course for World Literature is an amazing course filled with presentations, discussions, and plenty of reading You will start your journey this summer by choosing two of the books below. Don t freak out yet! This list was created by the students, for the students, with my approval. Students who have taken my class in the past have suggested the books on this list, so you know they are unbelievable choices. Now onto the assignment 1. Don t panic. 2. Be excited 3. You will read two books. You choose which two from the list below. 4. You must complete the attached Summer Read Response Sheet for each novel. This means you will turn in two sheets. Please be as detailed as you possibly can. The more information, time, and effort you put into these sheets, the better grade you will have come September. 5. You will turn these two sheets in on the first day of school. 6. If you fail to turn in these sheets, you will receive a zero. This is one of the few assignments all year that you cannot turn in late. 7. I recommend and encourage using sources to help you understand literature; however, when I ask you to summarize, analyze, identify or describe something, I expect you to provide your own answer. If any portion of your work is recognizable from any source and is not cited, I will consider it an act of academic dishonesty (plagiarism) and you will face consequences. You will receive a 0 on summer reading! If you lose this paper, you can visit the list on the TRN Home Page, click on Resources for Students on the left side bar, and the assignment will be listed under the Summer Read list or you can visit my eboard. To get on my eboard: go to click Directory (top right), click eboard search (left), type clittle, then click on the assignments tab, and then summer read. If you find yourself lost or struggling, feel free to me at clittle@trschools.com I hope you have a wonderful summer and I look forward to working with you next year

2 Summer Read Book Choices for World Literature *You must choose TWO novels* NOVEL CHOICES 1. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez 2. The Bonesetters Daughter by Amy Tan 3. The Color of Water by James McBride 4. A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah 5. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut 6. West of Kabul, East of New York by Tamim Ansary 7. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini 8. Zoya s Story: An Afghan Woman s Struggle for Freedom by Zoya, John Follain and Ruta Cristofari 9. I am Nujood, Age 10 & Divorced by Nujood Ali 10. Sold by Patricia McCormick 11. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 12. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin 13. After Dark by Haruki Murakami 14. Along the River by Adeline Yen Mah 15. South of the Border by Haruki Murakami 16. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 17. Chanda a Wars by Allan Stratton 18. Little Bee by Chris Cleave 19. The Daughters of Juarez by Teresa Rodriguez 20. Barefoot in Baghdad by Manal M. Omar 21. The Kite Rider by Geraldine McCaughrean 22. Tis by Frank McCourt 23. The Zookeeper s Wife by Diane Ackerman 24. The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan 25. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Asar Nafisi 26. All But My Life by Gerda Weissmann Klein 27. Princess: The True Story of Life Behind the Veil by Jean Sasson 28. Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography--The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane

3 SUMMEREAD Response Sheet Your Name Book Title Author Directions: Answer the following questions in as much detail as possible. Use separate paper if necessary. 1. What is the issue presented in this selection? 2. Based on the information presented in this selection, do you feel this is an accurate account of the issue? Explain why or why not using two details and/or examples from the text. 3. What is the author s purpose in writing this selection? Use two details and/or examples from the text to explain why you believe this to be the purpose. 4. How does the content of this selection relate to the real world around you? What connections can you make between what you ve read and other events or issues in the world today or in history? 5. Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not? 6. Describe an experience or emotion that you share with a character or person in the book you read. Be sure to explain in detail both the character s and your own experience or feeling and how they are similar. 7. Tell what you consider the most important event, character, feeling, or decision in the book and why. Use specific examples from the book to support your opinion.

4 8. Double Entry Journal (DEJ): While you are reading, you will need to keep a double entry journal of no more than six entries for the book you read: two entries from the beginning, two from the middle, and two from the end of the book. This journal will have two columns: The left side column is the place to write important quotes, ideas, and/or issues. You must include a page number on which each passage appears. The right side column is where you explain why you chose this particular passage and how it made you think or feel. The DEJ template to be completed appears on in this outline; a sample DEJ using the book Number the Stars is also here. There are also reading tips following the sample outline.

5 Book Title: Double Entry Journal Page Number Reactions, Connections, Quote/Text Questions

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7 Page Number Quote/Text EXAMPLE Double Entry Journal Number the Stars Reaction, Connection, Questions And now she and all the Danes were to be bodyguards for Ellen, and Ellen s parents and all of Denmark s Jews would she die to protect them? pg.26. I don t know if at 10 years old I would be willing to die Annemarie has a tough decision to make. It is her best friend but at the same time she would also be leaving her family. I think this puts her in a very difficult spot because if she chose not to protect how might Ellen feel? To be dead so young, I wouldn t want the Germans to take my family away, to make us live someplace else. But still, it wouldn t be as bad as being dead, pg. 42. Does Annemarie know what is going on around them? I think it would be difficult to leave my family because you don t know if you will ever see them again. As a young girl does she know what the Germans are doing? Or is she too naïve to see all of the negativity in the country? Star of David in her hand, pg. 49. I think at this point we do see that Annemarie was willing to stand up for Ellen. She quickly takes her necklace, which is an indication that she is Jewish, and hides it from the officers. I think if the officers did see the necklace they would have been angry or suspicious and may even have punished Annemarie. That s all that brave means-not thinking about dangers. Just thinking about what you must do, pg Being brave must have been incredibly difficult at a time like this. I don t know how they were able to put on a happy face knowing what was happening around them. How would you not allow yourself to think of all the negatives? That s all that brave means-not thinking about dangers. Just thinking about what you must do, pg Being brave must have been incredibly difficult at a time like this. I don t know how they were able to put on a happy face at a time like this. How would you not allow yourself to think wonder how one group of people could be so hated? How

8 one man could do something so awful? It makes me sad just thinking about it, let alone having experienced/lived it. Until then, Annemarie told him, I will wear it myself, pg I think this shows how much their friendship meant to her. Even though Ellen and Annemarie weren t together at that point she probably felt like she had a piece of Ellen with her until they met again. Below are some tips to help you with your reading. They are only tips. Advice for Active Reading and Keeping a Reading Journal 1. Good reading is not fast reading. The best advice I can give you about reading is to slow down. Reading well is all about paying attention. You ll get more out of your reading and probably enjoy it more as well if you give it time and minimize distractions when you read. 2. The best reading is often rereading. The best readers are those who are willing to go back and reread a piece of literature again and again. Well-written literature rewards this willingness to reread by allowing readers to continue seeing new things with each reading. Of course, this is not always possible, but go back and reread key sections, or even a whole work, if doing so could help with your understanding. 3. Be an active reader not a passive reader. The reading we do in everyday life is passive. We take in information without questioning it or looking for deeper meaning. For many kinds of reading, this is perfectly appropriate. However, active reading, which involves asking critical questions and probing more deeply into the meaning of what we read, is most appropriate for imaginative literature. 4. There is a persistent myth in literature classes that the purpose of reading is to scour a text for hidden meaning. In truth, the meanings in literary texts are not hidden, and your job as a reader is not to root around for them. Rather, if a text is not immediately accessible to you, it is because you need to read more actively, and meaning will then emerge in a collaborative effort as you work with the text to create a consistent interpretation. If you find this sort of reading hard, take that as a good sign. It means you re paying the sort of attention that a well-crafted poem, story, or play requires of a reader. 5. Read with a pen or pencil in hand in order to annotate your text and take notes. Underline, circle, or otherwise highlight passages that strike you as particularly important. Make notes in the margins as to why certain points strike you. Ask questions of the text. Talk back to the text. Look for unusual features of language. Develop your own system of shorthand. 6. Keep a reading journal. Avoid strict plot summary! Include comments on the characters, your personal evaluation of the work, and most importantly, note the writing style, literary techniques used, and concerns of the author. You should record enough details so that you can remember important names and events. Make notes that would be too long or complex to fit in the margins.

9 Go a step further than you do in your annotations. Try out a few possible answers to the questions you have raised. Expand your ideas from single phrases and sentences into entire paragraphs and see how they hold up under this deeper probing. Some journal writers use a sort of double-entry system, with questions and direct references to the text on one side of a page and original ideas or free associations on the other. Many of your questions will be complex and the sort of probing queries that may have multiple or even contradictory answers. Even if you never form a satisfactory answer to some questions, they will have served their purpose if they have made you think. Your questions about literature could be about the text, the author, the reader, or the cultural contexts of the work. 7. One final and very important tool of active reading is the DICTIONARY. You ll get much more out of your reading if you are willing to make the small effort involved in looking up unknown words. Not all words are definable from context alone, so don t be reluctant to use the dictionary!