AP Literature Extra Credit/ Enrichment Activity

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AP LiteratureExtra Credit/ Enrichment Activity

• K. Matteson
• Fall 2011

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The Assignment

• Choose one of the following books
• Annotate the book. You must turn in your copy to
  me with at least two annotations per page.
  Underlined sections do not count as annotations.
• Complete a Readers Notebook (See document
  attached to blog)
• Sit down for a brief interview with Matteson
• ALL parts of this assignment are due December
  22nd!

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The Books
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Atonement by Ian McEwan
-- With its intricate backward fairy tales, its
deliciously stagy scenes, its telescoped time
scheme, its forest of allusions, its narrative
once-overs and doublings-back, its sharp
questions about the experience of fiction, Ian
McEwan's "Atonement" seems less a story than a
soulful game. (Entertainment Weekly)
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Beloved by Toni Morrison
In Toni Morrison's new novel, ''Beloved,'' a
runaway slave, her capture imminent, slashes her
infant daughter's throat rather than see the
child in chains. ''It was absolutely the right
thing to do,'' Ms. Morrison said, ''but she had
no right to do it. I think if I had seen what she
had seen, and knew what was in store, and I felt
that there was an afterlife - or even if I felt
that there wasn't - I think I would have done the
same thing.
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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
One of the best-known horror stories ever. Victor
Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, has a great
ambition to create intelligent life. But when
his creature first stirs, he realizes he has made
a monster. A monster which, abandoned by its
maker and shunned by everyone who sees it, dogs
Dr Frankenstein with murder and horrors to the
very ends of the earth . .
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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Sometimes the last person on earth you want to be
with is the one person you can't be without.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest
thing in American literature to an Old Testament
prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human
emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about
civilization's slow death after the power goes
out - Publishers Weekly
His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness
only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living
master. It's gripping, frightening, and,
ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the
best book of the year, period. - The San
Francisco Chronicle
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A Lesson before Dying by Ernest Gaines
This is a straightforward novel, that masterfully
evokes a time and a place and a community that
was forced to bear inhuman injustices.  The
dignified manner in which a simple man rises up
and, with courage and grace,  accepts the burden
of man's inhumanity to man makes for an uplifting
tale of the triumph of the the human spirit.
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Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
"With the right soundtrack, with the right singer
singing the right music, all battlefields can
become utopias." The Los Angeles Times Book
Review
"The most romantic novel in years. A strange,
terrific, spellcasting story." San Francisco
Chronicle