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Dear Students and Families,

The English Department sends you the following reading lists in hopes that your summer will be enriched by the texts we have suggested.

We ask that students read two books in the coming months. The first is this year’s All-School Read, Gloria Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking 1987 work Borderlands/La Frontera, which will set up a yearlong program of speakers and exhibitions on campus around the theme of borders. 

As you begin Borderlands/La Frontera, you may be surprised to encounter a great deal of Spanish, much of which Anzaldúa leaves untranslated. If you are a Spanish speaker, you may feel at home. If you are not, we encourage you to refrain from any attempt to translate these passages. Rather, let the language wash over you, considering what sort of linguistic barrier or entry point it forms for you as a reader. We also urge you to watch this short video made by members of our community and to peruse this helpful study guide as you begin to encounter and work through this unique and powerful text. 

You should select your second summer reading book from the list of options provided, which we have sorted by grade level. While the various texts on offer mean that students will arrive on campus with a range of different reading experiences, we will gather around the oak tables in Main Building this September to transform them into a more collective conversation.

There will likely be moments of real joy and contemplation as we read, as well as encounters with language that may unsettle or even offend us. Navigating such encounters is essential, and should we find ourselves in such a moment, we—and the works themselves—will be best served by considering the context of vexing material: Does the author use it disparagingly or gratuitously? How do the language and the events described serve the work as a whole? We offer such questions as ways to help us all make the most of our summer reading and to begin what soon becomes a shared communal inquiry next fall.  

As a reflection of the English Department's goal of encouraging literacy across genres, we ask that students choose at least one work from each of the following genres listed for their grade level: prose, poetry, and film. Students should, of course, feel free to explore more than one option!

At the close of what we hope is a restful and reinvigorating summer, you will be asked to speak and write about the works you have explored and to share your reactions and reflections with others. We aim to establish class atmospheres of respectful rapport and curiosity, and our words about the readings and viewings we each select over the summer are the first steps to that end. 

Sincerely,

Dr. Katie Fleishman 

Head of the English Department

All-School Summer Read

All students must read and be prepared to discuss this book in the fall.

Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa

A helpful study guide may be found here. 

Preps (9th Graders)

Please choose a few poems and one work of prose to read, and watch the film as well.

Prose: Clap When You Land (Acevedo); The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Kamkwamba and Mealer); The Diary of a Young Girl (Frank); The Summer Book (Jansson)

Poetry: (Choose 3-4 from this list, but feel free to peruse all): List of Poems

Film: Persepolis

Lower Mids (10th Graders)

Please choose one option from each list: prose, poetry, and film.

Prose: Demon Copperhead (Kingsolver); The Watchmen (Moore); Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez); The Awakening (Chopin); The Beet Queen (Erdrich); The Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri); The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger); If Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin)

Poetry: “The Drunken Driver has the Right of Way” (Ethan Coen); “#632 The Brain -is Wider than the Sky” (Dickinson); “Design” (Frost); “Bird-Understander” (Craig Arnold); “The Writer” (Richard Wilbur); “Who Said It Was Simple” (Audre Lorde); “Saturday’s Child” (Countee Cullen); “Metamorphosis” (Jenny Xie); “Ah Ah” (Joy Harjo)

Film: Watchmen (2020); The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941); The Birds (1963); Look Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); Crooklyn (1994); Boyhood (2014); Hidden Figures (2016); Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Upper Mids (11th Graders)

Please choose one option from each list: prose, poetry, and film.

Prose: Gulliver’s Travels (Swift); The Moonstone (Collins); Wuthering Heights (Brontë); Great Expectations (Dickens); The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood); The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro); On Beauty (Z. Smith); The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid)

Poetry: “Sunday Morning” (Stevens); “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Whitman); “Shine, Perishing Republic” (Jeffers); “One Art” (Bishop); “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth); “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats); “Ozymandias” (Shelley); “The Second Coming” (Yeats); “Tulips” (Plath); “Aunties” (Young); “An Arundel Tomb” (Larkin); “The Poet” (Neruda); “Wessex Heights” (Hardy); “What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse” (Davis)

Film: Beauty and the Beast (1946); Rear Window (1954); Rashomon (1950); Remains of the Day (1993); The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999); Waking Life (2001); The Trip (2002); Girlhood (French: Bande de Filles, 2014)

Seniors (12th Graders)

Please choose one option from each list: prose, poetry, and film.

Prose: David Copperfield (Dickens); When Rain Clouds Gather (Head); The Things They Carried (O’Brien); Kindred (Butler); If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler (Calvino); White Noise (DeLillo); The Road (McCarthy); Wonder Boys (Chabon); The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides); Cloud Atlas (Mitchell); Atonement (McEwan); Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Thien); Open City (Cole); Americanah (Adichie)

Poetry: “The Man He Killed” (Hardy); “Song of Myself” (Whitman); “A Work of Artifice” (Piercy); “Idea of Order at Key West” (Stevens); “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (Donne); “Ars Poetica” (Dove); “Bay Poem from Berkeley” (Cisneros); “Annabel Lee” (Poe); “Wessex Heights” (Hardy)

Film: BlacKkKlansman; Jo Jo Rabbit; Winter’s Bone; Parasite; Dr. Strangelove; Brokeback Mountain; Lady Bird; Finding the King; The Color Purple; Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; The Graduate (1967); Mustang (2015); Parasite (2019); Rashomon (1950); Psycho (1960); Requiem for A Dream; Hoop Dreams; Do The Right Thing (1989)

The Hotchkiss School | www.hotchkiss.org | (860) 435-2591