Birmingham Schools



12th Grade Pre-course/Summer Reading

Find the lists for the 2 Senior English courses you are taking next year, and follow the reading guidelines before you have the class.

Creative Writing:

Read famous poets and come to class with seven poems that you like.

Here are some possible websites to begin your search:

(Top 500 poems)







Honors Creative Writing:

On Writing, King

Film Study

Student choice: one book

Holocaust Lit:

Choose one Holocaust book, nonfiction or realistic fiction, excluding Night, Address Unknown, Maus and All But My Life.

Honors Literary Humanities: Choose one book to read from the list below:

The Alchemist, Coelho

The Art of Happiness, Dalai Lama

Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus:  The Great Philosophers, Volume I , Jaspers

The Fall of Human Intellec, A. Parthasarathy

The Last Lecture, Pausch

Readings in Lit: Choose one book to read from the list below:

Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer

The Fault in Our Stars, Green

About a Boy, Hornby

Poisonwood Bible, Kingsolver

She’s Come Undone, Lamb

Breaking Night: a memoir of forgiveness, survival, and my journey from homeless to Harvard, Murray

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot

(or any other book from this 12th grade list)

Newspaper

10 Columns by any newspaper or magazine or online columnist

Science Fiction:

Science Fiction is a genre of literature that wrestles with the fundamental questions of what it means to be human in an age of rapidly advancing technologies. You should start the class with some interesting ideas already in place, either gleaned from reading articles about science or technological breakthroughs, viewing science fiction films (Edge of Tomorrow, Looper, and Her are great recent efforts), or reading a science fiction novel that intrigues you (Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Andy Weir’s The Martian are fascinating, recently-written books).  What does the future hold for the human species?

Senior Writing:

Find a blogger or columnist who fascinates you and become familiar with his or her work. Think about how the writer helps you make sense of your everyday experience. What about the writer’s style makes it compelling? In lieu of a columnist or blogger (many excellent examples available at ), you can read a nonfiction book that grapples with an issue that fascinates you.

Yearbook

The Talon 2015

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download