AP Language and Composition Book List. Your Favorite?

Question

So here's the list of authors:
Joseph Addison, James Agee, Margaret Atwood, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, G. K. Chesterton, Joan Didion, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Fussell, Mavis Gallant, Nadine Gordimer, Edward Hoagland, Zora Neale Hurston, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles Lamb, Norman Mailer, Nancy Mairs, Mary McCarthy, N. Scott Momaday, Michel de Montaigne, V. S. Naipaul, Tillie Olsen, George Orwell, Cynthia Ozick, Ishmael Reed, Adrienne Rich, Mordecai Richler, Sharman Apt Russell, Scott Russell Sanders, Richard Selzer, Richard Steele, Shelby Steele, Henry David Thoreau, John Updike, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, E. B. White, Terry Tempest Williams, Virginia Woolf.

What is your favorite book by any of these authors, and why?
(I need to find a book to read from the collegeboard list to read).

And if you don't like any of these authors, what is your favorite book that you think would be appropriate to read as an AP Student (like Steinbeck, Faulkner...).

Thanks!

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

I like If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, and a few different things by Walker--essays and fiction.

I'm unfamiliar with Addison, Agee, Chesterton, Fussell, Gallant, Hoagland, Lamb, Mairs, McCarthy, Ozick, Reed, Richler, Russell, Sanders, Selzer, Steele 1 & 2, and Williams.

I'm mostly indifferent to Atwood, Bacon, Didion, Gordimer, Mailer, Olsen, Orwell, Rich, Updike, Welty, and White.

I DISlike Emerson, Momaday, Naipaul, Thoreau, and Woolf.

Source(s):

English degree, 4 years teaching English.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

thanks!

we are reading their eyes were watching god, siddhartha, and the call of the wild this year.

i hate emerson and thoreau too, actually all those authors from the puritan age to the realism age. I do like some naturalism though.

Answer 2

well I just read "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston (summer reading assignment for AP english .. lol) but.. I think you'd have to read that too for ap english... so... iono... BUT I thought it was a marvelous book.. Don't just watch the movie... Read the book... The diction is a bit hard to understand at first.. But you get used to it... It's a great book.. =] a book I finished in two days was "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien... It's enrapturing.. Good luck on your search...

Answer 3

I would choose Alice Walker's _The color purple_ I have read it several times and it just gets better and better.

Montaigne's _Essais_ are very accessible. He is known as "The philosopher of experience." He writes about the philosophy of being human: what it's like to suffer with a toothache, the pleasure of reading a poem, how it feels as his body gets older.

Margaret Atwood's _The handmaid's tale_ is an awesome book. You will really be turning the pages.

Jamaica Kincaid - _A small place_ is good, very short.

Also, John Steinbeck's _Of mice and men_ is short and absolutely brilliant!

Answer 4

Of the authors in that list that I had read, I love Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Didion's Play it as it Lays is an excellent book, as is Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. Emerson, Montaigne, Thoreau, and Welty are all very interesting, but I wouldn't say I loved their work. It is certainly worth a read and could come in handy in AP. As for other books appropriate for an AP student, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath is great, or perhaps something by Faulkner like As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury. I remember, back when I took the AP, thinking one of the characters from The Lord of the Rings would have been perfect to use in my last essay, but it had been so long since I read those books that I couldn't remember enough details to use him. You might also enjoy other classics, like Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, or even the Iliad and the Odyssey. All are good to have read at least once. Good luck!