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AP Language and Composition

Students in AP Language and Composition 
are required to read one book
and five essays of their choosing.
Essays are available on the internet.

Book Choices (Choose one)

  1. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  2. My Own Words by Ruth Bader Ginsburg (contributors: Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams)

  3. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

  4. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

  5. Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

  6. My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber

  7. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance

Essay Reading List (Choose five)

  1. James Baldwin’s Notes of the Native Son

  2. Wendell Berry’s An Entrance to the Woods

  3. Eula Bliss’s The Pain Scale

  4. Robert Dallek’s The Medical Ordeals of JFK

  5. Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That

  6. William Hazlitt’s On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth

  7. Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (first section only)

  8. John McPhee’s The Search for Marvin Gardens

  9. Chimamanda Adichie's We Should All Be Feminists

  10. Lia Purpura’s Autopsy Report

  11. Scott Russell Sanders’s Under the Influence

  12. Richard Selzer’s The Knife

  13. David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster

  14. E.B. White’s Once More to the Lake

  15. Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister

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Upon their return in September, students should come to class with their five essays annotated and be ready to discuss their reading. Here is a sample of an effectively annotated text:

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