Books+for+Advanced+Readers

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=**Title:** //**The Second Sex**//= =**Author:** Simone de Beauvoir= =**Genre:** Philosophy/Feminism= =**Lexile Level: 1560**= =Description:= ====//The Second Sex,// written by French existentialist author Simone de Beauvoir, examines the history of female oppression and its repercussions on how women assert themselves in society. Beauvoir explains that women are at a disadvantage in a man's world because they are prevented from being "free and autonomous"; they have been the inferior race - "the other" which has caused women to become more irrational, emotional and selfish. She argues that it is the woman's situation, not her essence that has nutured these inadequacies. Beauvoir hugely influenced the feminist movement.==== ====Rationale: //The Second Sex// is an essential philosophical work that examines such themes as sex and gender, philosophy, existential phenomenology, ethics, politics, oppression and freedom; it requires higher order thinking in order to process such rich and sophisticated topics.====

[|Mini-documentary of Beauvoir]
= **Title: //Moby-Dick// (1851)** =

**Theme or Topic:** Ambition, Friendship, Loyalty, Fate, Death, Revenge, Man vs. Nature.
=**Description:**=

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You know the drill: an old seadog named Captain Ahab lost his leg while he was hunting a white whale named Moby-Dick. Ahab isn’t the kind of guy who lets things go, and he has since devoted his life to the destruction of the white whale. The narrator is a sensitive soul named Ishmael who goes to work as a deckhand on a whaling ship called The Pequod. Other timeless characters include the “noble savage” Queequeg and the principled first-mate Starbuck. The white whale itself has become a sort of master-metaphor: he could represent God, the imagination, nature itself, or the destructive power of blind ambition. Possibly the best novel ever written. Certainly the best novel I’ve ever read. =====

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I know that //Moby-Dick// is a Hard Book to Read. It’s quite a long novel, and it’s jam-packed with information. There are chapters dedicated to the specifics of whale anatomy, the complicated symbolism of the color ‘white’, and the ambivalent role of whales in folklore all over the world. There are several points in the book where the reader can get bogged down. But the book is also an exciting story about brave men hunting monsters. A smart teacher can even cut out some of the more encyclopedic chapters, so the students can focus on the plot and the interesting character interactions. This book is challenging, yes, but is it impossible? No. Bright upperclassmen with plenty of time and a helpful teacher could benefit greatly from reading it. ======

**Resources:**
[|Adapting //Moby-Dick// for Severe Cognitive Disabilities.] Here a teacher goes over his best ideas for teaching this difficult book to students with cognitive disabilities. It can be done! [|One Drawing for Every Page of //Moby-Dick//]. An artist set out to illustrate every single one of the books 530 pages. Some of the art is less representational and more abstract, but this could be a good teaching aid if the students are having trouble visualizing the action of the book. You can just find out what pages they’re struggling with, and you can look up those pages on the blog. Voila! Instant visual aid! Check it out. //[|Leviathan]//. The 2004 album by the heavy metal band Mastodon. The album was inspired by a hellish 30-hour flight where Brett Hinds, the singer-guitarist, read the entire Melville novel. Hinds went on to create a concept album inspired by the book. The cover art is a great illustration of the central conflict in the book. The link below is to a youtube channel where you can listen to all ten songs on the album. The opening song “Blood & Thunder” is a powerful rendition of Captain Ahab’s voice: “Break your backs and crack your oars men when you see the White Whale!”

= = = **Title: //The Crying of Lot 49//** (1965) =

**Description:**
Oedipa Maas is a suburban housewife in 1960’s California. Her husband is a radio DJ, and she goes to Tupperware parties. She has kind of a boring life until her old boyfriend Pierce Inverarity dies. Pierce was a ridiculously wealthy man, and he has named Oedipa as the executor of his estate. Oedipa becomes an amateur detective as she goes digging into the man’s last will and testament. She finds evidence of a secret conspiracy called W.A.S.T.E., which may or may not exist. W.A.S.T.E. is a secret underground postal system used by freaks, criminals, and political subversives. The deeper Oedipa goes into the mystery, the less she knows for certain. She keeps yoyoing back and forth between two disturbing possibilities: Pierce’s will is an elaborate practical joke or everything she knows about America is wrong.

**Rationale:**
This is another one of those books that I read when I was young that I haven’t been able to shake. It’s only 150 pages long, but the prose is super-stylish, the symbolism is intricate, and the historical allusions are well-developed. This is a very rewarding book to read line-by-line in class. You could spend an hour talking about every single page of this book. Or you could read the whole thing in two weeks and be done with it. This book rewards multiple readings and different perspectives. It’s also very funny, and it’s a playful mind-game, akin to the work of Umberto Eco. Readers who enjoy this book would be well-prepared to explore Pynchon’s more ambitious work like //V.// and //Gravity’s Rainbow//. Lexile Level: 1060L

**Resources:**
[|“The First Page: //The Crying of Lot 49//] by T. Pynchon.” An in-depth reading of the first page of the novel by Thomas C. Foster. This is a wonderful example of how much you can be rewarded if you go through this book line-by-line.

[|The Crying of Lot 49 Wiki:] Very detailed information about the arcane references, unusual vocabulary, and bizarre symbolism in the book. Very well organized in a chapter-by-chapter format. Highly recommended. = =

= **Title:** //**One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)**// =

**Magical Realism****Description:**
In a non-linear, cyclical fashion, Marquez tells a story of an isolated town, the Macondo in South America, and its founders, the Buendia Family. The story spans over one hundred years, yet is devoid of a regular timeline; it chronicles seven generations of the Buendia Family and how their mysterious, tenacious and solitary traits are represented and passed from generation to generation. The family goes through a myriad of trials and tribulations that, despite all hope, leave their town and themselves in a state of despair and further isolation.

**Rationale:**
This is an excellent novel for advanced readers because it challenges their sense of time and space as they are forced to piece together the complexity of the layout. Marquez' lyricism is beautiful and rich with magical realism - combining the fantastic with the ordinary - giving an aesthic to the language unmatched by others. There are many complex and implicit themes throughout the novel to consider: religion, politics, sexuality, time, solitude and civilization.

**Additional Resources:**
[|Cent'anni di solitudine][|The Modern World - Marquez]

[|Nobel Prize Lecture]

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=**Title: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into V****alues (1974)**= =**Author: Robert M. Pirsig**= =**Genre: Philosophical Novel**= =**Descripition:**= An introduction to Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality, he attempts to address the central idea of quality,an indefinable characteristic. The plot of the book describes, in first person, a 17-day journey on his motorcycle from Minnesota to California by the author and his son Chris, joined for the first nine days by close friends John and Sylvia Sutherland. The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions, referred to as Chautauquas by the author, on topics including epistemology, ethical emotivism and the philosophy of science. Whether working on the motorcycle, setting up camp or eating with his son Pirsig seeks to demonstrate that rationality and Zen-like "being in the moment" can harmoniously coexist. He suggests such a combination of rationality and romanticism can potentially bring a higher quality of life. =**Rationale:**= Pirsig’s ability to synthesize and explain old schools of philosophy in new and interesting ways enables readers to connect the practical to the philosophical–classical and romantic. He artfully weaves between the arts and sciences and explores ideas that have been carried forward since the Greeks. A surface level appeal about maintaining a motorcycle may draw in young male readers. What captivates all readers however, is that the story itself has a degree of suspense thanks to the mysterious allusion to the schizophrenia that the narrator of the book has, fighting between an ideal and pragmatic self. =**Themes:** The search for meaning and identity, crises of reason, knowledge and learning= =Lexile Level: 1040= =**Rubric:**= Layout: Very Complex Purpose and Meaning: Very Complex Structure: Complex Language Features: Complex Knowledge Demands: Complex =Additional Resources:= [|View site] [|ZMMQ Site for beginners] [|Watch trailer for documentary to be released in 2012] [] – This review of the text supports the value of Pirsig's novel as an entry level philosophical text. [] – A succinct guide to Pirsig's text on a chapter by chapter basis.

=**Title: The Turn of the Screw (1897)**= =**Author: Henry James**= =**Genre: Gothic Fiction**= =**Description:**= A good old fashion ghost story, or is it? An anonymous narrator begins the story and then it shifts and is told from the governesses' point of view. The story is full of deliberate ambiguity that keeps the reader engaged and in suspense. Part ghost story and part psychological thriller, this classic tale concerns an unsuspecting governess hired by a wealthy recluse to look after his orphaned niece and nephew — two seemingly innocent children who soon reveal terrifying secrets. =**Rationale:**= Using the genre of the ghost story, credited as originating with M.R. James, a contemporary of Henry James, the author skillfully provokes the reader’s anxieties by evoking the psychological mechanisms of the horror of the unknown. The effect, as is always the case with a well-crafted ghost story or something in a similar genre, is that existential questions rise to the surface of the reader’s consciousness, allowing the reader of "Turn of the Screw" and the writer to enter into a dialogue about real life through the medium of seemingly fantastic events. The ghosts, real or imagined provoke readers to the end to solve the mystery. =**Themes:** The corruption of the innocent, forbidden and taboo subjects, heroism and alienation.= =Lexile Level: 1140= =**Rubric:**= Layout: Very Complex Purpose and Meaning: Very Complex Structure: Very Complex Language Features: Complex Knowledge Demands: Complex



= **Title: //The Sound and the Fury//** = **Author:** William Faulkner**Genre:** Fiction/American Literature =**D****escription:**= The ostensible subject of //The Sound and the Fury// is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartles s, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family. If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character. Notoriously "difficult," //The Sound and the Fury//is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis: > And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo. What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is //The Sound and the Fury// that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." //--David Laskin//

**Rationale:**
Faulkner is notoriously challenging, and honestly the whole time I was reading this book I was pretty confused. I had to just "go with it" and enjoy the ride. (It helped when I finally understood--about halfway through--that there were two characters with the same name.) Anything by this author will be challenging, but it's also such an unusual experience, with fun and craziness inherent =**Themes:** Changing of cultural values, resurrection and renewal, familial dysfunction, weird sexual stuff= =Lexile Level: 870L= **Text Complexity:**Layout: Very Complex TextsPurpose & Meaning: Very Complex TextsStructure: Very Complex TextsLanguage Features: Very Complex TextsKnowledge Demands Fiction: Very Complex Texts**Resources:**[|The Sound and the Fury Sparknotes]

[|Oprah's site on The Sound and the Fury]

=**Title:** //**This Side of Paradise**////**(**//**1920**//**)**//= =**Author:** F. Scott Fitzgerald= =**Genre:** Fiction, bildungsroman, period drama= =**Description:**= Fitzgerald's first novel centers on Amory Blaine and follows him from his youth through college, military service, several love affairs and the loss of his mentor. As Amory grows and changes the audience is subjected to narration of questionable reliability and the length of time which the text covers offers an extensive view of WWI era America. =**Rationale:**= Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby” has long been an iconic high school reading experience, but where it succeeds as a novel it fails to deliver much of the historical insight with which it is often credited. Gatsby sticks close to its characters and storyline with temporal markers limited to the mention of prohibition and WWI. In contrast “This Side of Paradise,” by virtue of its longer time line, offers extensive opportunities to view the experience of numerous age groups during the time period. Texts in this category might ask students to undertake unique critical tasks, this novel challenges them to hone their ability to glean a wealth of contextual information from a text. =**Text Complexity:**= =Lexile 1070L= =**Rubric:**= Layout: Very Complex Purpose and Meaning: Complex Structure: Very Complex Language Features: Very Complex Knowledge Demands: Complex =Additional Resources:= __[]__ – An interview from 1936 that provides insight into Fitzgerald's often overlooked later years. The article makes an interesting counterpoint to his first novel that made Fitzgerald a meteoric success just 16 years prior. __[]__ – Excellent short film interpretation of one of the novel's earlier episodes.

= **//Love Medicine//** =

[[image:lit519/Love_Medicine.jpg width="178" height="270" align="left"]]**Description:**
Erdrich tells a story of two families and how they intertwine through several generations from a variety of viewpoints and voices. Her language is complex, poetic, and stunning.

**Rationale:**
The book is complex in both its literary conventions and its subject. It really challenges American readers to look at perceptions of love and relationships as well as the pervasive nature of Euro-American culture. Furthermore, the language is so hauntingly beautiful that the experience of reading makes the challenges well worth it.Lexile Level: 780L

**Resources:**
**[|//Love Medicine// study notes]** **[|Lesson Plans for //Love Medicine//]** **[|NEA //Love Medicine// Lesson Plans (Ten Days)]**

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**Description:**
The Stranger is a novel written by Albert Camus which discovers various schools of philosophical thought including existentialism, absurdism, nihilism, and naturalism. The main character, Meursault, gives a first person narrative which is broken up into two parts: before and after he murders another man. Meursault struggles with the meaning of life before he murders a man, and struggles with what will happen to him after his death after he murders the man.

**Rationale:**
This novel is great for 11-12 grade reading because of the philosophical concepts it explores. Although quantitatively the work is considered lower than a 11-12 grade level, qualitatively it is much higher. It requires the students to understand concepts which are not explicitly stated and think deeper about philosophical ideas such as existentialism or nihilism. This opens the doors for lengthy in-depth discussions and written work by the students.

**Complexity:**
Layout: Complex Purpose: Very Complex Structure: Somewhat Complex Language: Somewhat Complex

** Resources: **
[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(novel)] []

=Title: Native Son= =Author: Richard Wright= =Genre: African American Literature, Novel=

Description:
"The Native Son" delivers a chilling account of how an ordinary Black American, living in 1930s Chicago, can commit a heinous crime and subsequent cover-up, for the systemic racism and oppression present in America helped to create the conditions in which this horrendous act could occur. "The Native Son", written before the modern Civil Rights movement, does not issue a blanket amnesty for the crimes committed by Blacks, but helps the reader to understand the mindset of a Black living in this oppressed and segregated society where hope abounds only in the afterlife. Although Communists are portrayed sympathetically, this novel is not a call for a "revolution" or blatant propaganda against the "rich." -Amazon.com

Text Complexity:
=Additional Resources:= Lesson Plan Resources []

[[image:to+the+lighthouse.jpg width="201" height="302"]]
=Title: To the Lighthouse= =Author: Virginia Woolf= =Genre: Modernist, Stream of consciousness=

Description:
In what is perhaps one of the most well-known novels of the 20th century, Virginia paints the portrait of the Ramsey family living in their summer home on an island off the coast of Scotland at three pivotal moments. It's a simple story, but painfully beautiful in the telling. Written entirely in stream of conciousness, Woolf takes it one-step further than most and jumps from the thoughts of one person to the next with little to no warning. This can make it difficult to follow for many, but I only lost myself once and quickly figured it out. This is a storytelling device that has always greatly appealled to me and Woolf did not disappoint. The prose itself was more poetry than anything and many of the passages the words are strung together so beautifully that I can only describe it as hearbreaking. -Amazon.com

Text Complexity:
=Additional Resources:= Lesson Planning Ideas [] Allusions in the novel []



=Title:, Said the Shotgun to the Head= =Author: Saul Williams= =Genre: Poetry=

Description:
Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance... A truly epic poem both in content and in quality. Saul Williams really delivers the goods in this nigh novel length poem that centers around a world changing kiss. This poem is a mind melding and explosive look at the world we live in, and a call to change the world for the better. Ultimately it delivers on all counts that a great poem should, vivid imagery, captivating juxtapositions, amazing metrics, and an amazing rhythm- it truly does not miss a beat! Once you pick up ",said the Shotgun to the Head." you will not want to put it down, and it will stay with you long after you finally put it down. -Amazon.com

Text Complexity:
=Additional Resources:= media type="youtube" key="wKdHX2T5WcM" height="315" width="560"

Other Ideas: The Awakening Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Candide Sula Ulysses