DeMatha Catholic High School
Freshmen Summer Reading Requirements
Daniel J. McMahon, Ph.D.—Principal
What is the purpose of that seasonal event known as “summer reading”? What do schools and students hope to accomplish? Sometimes I look at reading lists that look like Adler’s “hundred great books.” I suspect that such lists are designed to impress parents or the school community that the school is of serious academic purpose.
My own sense of high school summer reading is that any text that would ordinarily require the mediation of a teacher to work with and that you would be better off processing through dialogue with classmates is something that you should avoid. So, The Odyssey, no; Jurassic Park, yes; Leo Tolstoy, no; Janet Evanovich, yes. One of my most inspired choices for summer reading was Bill Watterson’s The Essential Calvin and Hobbes – everyone read it, we discussed whether comics could be art or literature (and how do you define those terms anyway? and I’ll get to graphic novels in the suggested list), if humor could be serious, and whether people who live in their imaginations can be sympathetic and likeable – when I taught Don Quixote later that fall I had laid a great deal of groundwork through summer reading.
Any summer reading list that hasn’t been revised in a year is in danger of atrophying. I think that summer reading should reflect some things that the community values and some things that are current and that have become part of our cultural discourse.
An unacknowledged and often missed opportunity is to use summer reading to create a common culture. Our faculty read a book in common each summer and that helps us create community. Our students are part of our community and we ask them to belong to each other by reading some things in common.
Summer reading should keep the mind nimble. The school year is composed of rhythms of intense effort followed by reflection; of the introduction of the new and the review of the familiar. Summer reading should fit into that rhythm. It comes after the closing sprint to finish the academic year and before the beginning of the marathon that will exhaust and energize us. It should function then as the cool down to our rigorous exercise and the warm up to our next work out.
Is this to say there is no place for Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dante’s Commedia, or Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as summer reading? Well, I actually have read all of those on summer vacations but not everyone is an English teacher or a compulsive reader. Some of the best summer reading I’ve done includes John Grisham’s The Firm and John Feinstein’s The Last Amateurs. Neither one is great literature but my family was passing both around and reading them gave us the chance to talk about morality and the law in the one and the meaning of sports, money, and education in our society in the other.
Many researchers have noted that boys don’t read as much as girls. (In addition, out of 1.4 million students who took the SAT in last year; 750,000 were girls and 650,000 were boys and that portends serious problems for the future.) Failure to account for this in summer reading at an all-boys school will mean another missed opportunity to influence those boys on their way to manhood. A summer reading list that consists only of “the classics” is likely to miss some boys for whom the sports page and Sports Illustrated are the readings of choice.
We require you to read 2 of the following books and to do Reading Logs on them to be turned in the first week of school. These will be the first two entries in your Writing Portfolio. I have given brief annotations about each work and the requirements for the Reading Log.
1. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card. Aliens have attacked Earth twice and almost destroyed the human species. To make sure humans win the next encounter, the world government has taken to breeding military geniuses -- and then training them in the arts of war... The early training, not surprisingly, takes the form of 'games'... Ender Wiggin is a genius among geniuses; he wins all the games... He is smart enough to know that time is running out. But is he smart enough to save the planet? Will he sacrifice his “soldiers” to win?
2. White Fang, Jack London. Nature and nurture, our genes and our environment, each play a role in determining what we will become. In Call of the Wild, Jack London took a domestic dog and placed him in the wild to see how he might adapt. In White Fang, a wild dog/wolf is “civilized.” London explores these questions about which is more important, nature or nurture and asks us to consider whether loving someone or something, treating them in a certain way, can alter that creature’s nature and fate.
3. The Bomb, Theodore Taylor. In 1946, Taylor served aboard the USS Sumner, part of a naval team that set the stage for post-war atomic and hydrogen-weapons testings near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific-experiences at the crux of this novel. The Bikini natives live simply in accordance with age-old customs, taking all they need to subsist from the land and the sea. World War II intrudes when Japanese soldiers establish a weather station in their pristine village. Then, when U.S. Marines capture the island in the "Battle" of Bikini (actually the Japanese killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner), the islanders hold a celebration. Little do they know that the same government that has liberated them from the hated Japanese will shatter the peace forever. Three very real and likable characters-a courageous 14-year-old boy; his outspoken uncle, who after years away returns to the island with insight into modern society; and the island's perceptive schoolteacher-underscore the tragedy.
4. Maus, Art Spiegelman Art Spiegelman's "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" is a unique work of literature. It comes in two volumes and they are book-length comics or graphic novels—but they are not pure fiction—they are also memoir and biography. The narrator, Artie, and his father Vladek, a Shoah (the preferred term for the Holocaust) survivor are the main characters. The first volume is "My Father Bleeds History" and the second is "And Here My Troubles Began."
Artie is a comic book artist who interviews his father to get information about the Shoah and learns an enormous amount about his family and himself. The artwork acts as visual cue to help us identify people. How history continues to have an impact on the present is always at the heart of this work and reading something so serious handled in a genre that usually deals with superheroes or the comic causes us to think about the way we categorize art—are comic books literature? How do we know what art and literature are?
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DeMatha Reading Log
Name:Date:
1. Title of Book: (Be sure to underline or use italics.)
2. Author:
3. Publisher and Year of Publication:
4. Major Characters: (List each major character and provide a one-sentence description of each.)
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5. Setting: (Always include both place and date. If there are many settings, list them in chronological order.)
6. Plot Summary: (Briefly tell the story in approximately two paragraphs.)
7. Theme: (State the author’s message or main idea for writing this book.)
8. Reaction: (This section should be at least one paragraph long. Give your opinion of this novel. State why you feel as you do.)
9. Memorable Quotes: (Copy two quotes that are essential to the plot of the book or that mean something to you personally. Explain why you chose each quote.)