PORTSMOUTH ABBEY SCHOOL 2010 SUMMER READING

"My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India."               -Edward Gibbon

Reading offers a lifetime of pleasure and enrichment, a continuing education of the head and heart. Portsmouth Abbey School, with its Benedictine tradition, encourages devotion to the word. The flickering, distracting electronic world we inhabit makes time spent with a good book all the more important. By reading books together as a School we foster the "shared experience of community life" in our Mission Statement.  We hope our entire community—students, faculty, monks, staff, parents, alumni—will join the ageless and thoughtful community of readers. Practically, the best and most fruitful way to increase verbal skills is to read, not to take test-preparation courses.  We expect by requiring our students to spend some of their free summer time reading that they will improve those skills as well as develop the life-long habit of reading enjoyment. 

In keeping with these convictions, the Portsmouth Abbey Summer Reading follows a few precepts: 

• The summer books should be enjoyable reading, even when they are demanding.
• The summer books are not explicitly curricular—that is, a way to make students read additional, preliminary, or foundational course texts.
• The summer reading books should not have their pleasures sapped by elaborate study guides or constellated assignments.
• The summer books are not to be "read" via SparksNotes, Wikipedia, or other ignoble evasions of the real page. 

This summer each student will be required to read two books:

• Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning, the all-School Common Reader, and
• A title of the student's choosing from their respective Form list

To insure that the reading has been completed, early in the Fall term the English or Humanities teacher will administer a quiz on both books. The grade on the Summer Reading quiz will figure into the Fall term grades for each student.

As of the time this was written, all of these titles were readily available. 

Kale Zelden                                                  Roberta Stevens
Academic Dean                                           Library Director

Summer Form Readers 2010-11 School Year

Incoming 3rd Form

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Soloist, Steve Lopez
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
One Writer's Beginnings, Eudora Welty
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer
My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin Classics), Plutarch
The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Levels of the Game, John McPhee
A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson
The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford
My Antonia, Willa Cather

 Incoming 4th Form

The Professor and the Madman:  A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the OED, Simon Winchester
Emma, Jane Austen
Father Brown: The Essential Tales, G.K. Chesterton
Death in Holy Orders, P.D. James
The Aeneid, Virgil
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare
Othello, Shakespeare
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives (Penguin Classics), Plutarch
The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village, Eamon Duffy
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Rituals of Dinner:  The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners, Margaret Visser
Quo Vadis, Henry Sienkiewicz
The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis 

Incoming 5th Form

The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
A Prayer for Owen Meaney, John Irving
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah
The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Rector of Justin, Louis Auchincloss
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald
In the Heart of the Sea, Nathaniel Philbrick
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Letters to a Young Doubter, William Sloane Coffin

 Incoming 6th Form

Old School, Tobias Wolff
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Plague, Albert Camus
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn  Waugh

###