Archbishop Carroll High School Department of English Summer Reading 2006 The world has never known a great thinker who was not also a reader. So, if we want the world to have better thinkers, more compassionate, careful, thoughtful people, we need to encourage young people to practice reading- becoming regular, lifelong readers. We know all too well, young people who embrace the passivity of media like television and movies. It is much easier to watch television or movies because they ask so little of us. They do not engage our imaginations much. Rather, they hand us everything. Reading, however, demands that we imagine the sound of a voice, the color of a sky, the look in someone's eye. Reading invites us to get immersed in life, and to stop watching it and letting someone else give us the whole story. We urge all Carroll students to take the time this summer and read these books carefully. Keep them beside your bed, with you on the Metro, wherever you can get them, often. All students will be tested on them during the first week of classes, and this examination will count for 20% of the first quarter English grade. The books will not be discussed until after the examination. Take this opportunity and do not be passive. Begin the process of becoming a lifelong reader. Ninth Grade Students Read: Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents - Julia Alvarez To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Honors Students Only) Tenth Grade Students Read: The Pearl - John Steinbeck The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway Animal Farm - George Orwell (Honors Students Only) Eleventh Grade Students Read: Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank Buried Onions - Gary Soto Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison (Honors Students Only) Twelfth Grade Students Read: When I Was a Puerto Rican - Esmeralda Santiago The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X and Alex Hailey The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd The Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Honors and AP Students Only)