ENGLISH 9: BOOK LIST QUARTER 4

Choose from the annotated list of books:


Lord of the Flies Golding
The classic tale of a group of English school boys who are left stranded on an unpopulated island, and who must confront not only the defects of their society but the defects of their own natures.


Where the Red Fern Grows Rawls
A boy living in the Ozark Mountains acquires two beloved coon hounds, and together the three of them experience danger, adventure, love, and sorrow.


Leaving Cold Sassy Burns
Eagerly awaited by the millions of devoted fans of Cold Sassy Tree, this New York Times bestseller is the unfinished tale of Will Tweedy and the young schoolteacher who captures his heart.


Jurassic Park Crichton
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Creatures once extinct now roam Jurassic Park, soon-to-be opened as a theme park. Unfortunately, something goes wrong and science proves a dangerous toy.


Congo Crichton
The legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj have seen an eight-person field exhibition die. After startling discoveries, a new expedition is sent back into the Congo--its mission, to descend into a world where the only way back out may be through the grisliest death.


Emma Austin
A timeless coming-of-age story follows the adventures of the self-assured and accomplished Emma, a twenty-one-year-old girl of privilege who believes she is immune to romance and has several chaotic and often humorous experiences.


Oliver Twist Dickens
This is the story of an orphan raised in a workhouse, who runs away to London only to be captured by thieves from whom he eventually escapes. This novel is a morality tale and a detective story rolled into one and presents some of Dickens's darkest characters: Bill Sikes, the murderer; Fagin, the master thief; and the leering Artful Dodger.


A Time to Kill Grisham
A Southern town is shocked when a 10-year-old black girl is raped by two white men--until the girl's father takes the law into his own hands.


The Firm Grisham
Mitch McDeere, a Harvard Law graduate, becomes suspicious of his Memphis tax firm when mysterious deaths, obsessive office security, and the Chicago Mob figure into its operations.


Catch 22 Heller
Joseph Heller's classic WWII black comedy follows American bomber pilot Yossarian on his harrowing quest for the final mission that will free him from his military obligation.


A Wrinkle in Time L'Engle
Meg Murray, her little brother Charles Wallace, and their mother are having a midnight snack on a dark and stormy night when an unearthly stranger appears at their door. She claims to have been blown off course, and goes on to tell them that there is such a thing as a "tesseract," which, if you didn't know, is a wrinkle in time.


The Green Mile King
In a chilling novel by the author of Carrie and The Stand, a new prisoner at Cold Mountain Penitentiary presents an unusual dilemma for jaded prison guard Paul Edgecombe.



Hot Zone Preston
A deadly virus from Africa suddenly appears in the suburbs of the capital, killing 90 percent of its victims and remaining unaffected by modern medicine. Fantasy? Not according to Preston, who uses this scenario to consider the potentials for the outbreak of 'hot' viruses. A terrifying, true account.


The Mists of Avalon Bradley
The legends of King Arthur come to life in the extraordinary stories of the women in his life--including his half-sister Morgaine, a high-priestess of the religion of the Mother Goddess, and his beautiful wife Gwynhefar who is torn between her duty and her love for Lancelot.


Outsiders Hinton
Ponyboy is fourteen, tough and confused, yet sensitive behind his bold front. Since his parents' death, his loyalties have been to his brothers and his gang, the rough, swinging, long-haired boys from the wrong side of the tracks. When his best friend, Johnny, kills a member of a rival gang, a nightmare of violence begins and swiftly envelops Ponyboy in a turbulent chain of events.


The Perfect Storm Junger
A vivid account of a history-making storm that hit the New England coast in October 1991 and the lives it changed, The Perfect Storm weaves together the history of the fishing industry, the science of storms, and personal accounts.


Wuthering Heights Bronte, E.
Bronte reveals an uncanny understanding of the terrible truths about men and women, in a convincing, unsentimental account of passionate love.


Watership Down Adams
Chronicles the adventures of a group of rabbits searching for a safe place to establish a new warren where they can live in peace.


The Postman Brin
He was a survivor--a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale--of a nation on the road to recovery.


October Sky Hickam
In 1957, when 14-year-old Homer Hickam, a.k.a. Sonny, watches Sputnik fly over his hometown, his life is changed forever. Knowing he wants to be part of the space race, Sonny and his friends, set out to learn as much as they can about launching rockets. Soon, these Rocket Boys wind up enlisting the help of everyone in town.


Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (and other books in the series) Rowling
What did Harry Potter know about magic? He was stuck with the decidedly un-magical Dursleys, who hated him. He slept in a closet and ate their leftovers. But an owl messenger changes all that, with an invitation to attend the Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches, where it turns out Harry is already famous.


The Eight Nevile
When two young women in France of 1790 discover the Montglane Chess Service in Montglane Abbey, they recognize its mystic ability to provide anyone playing it with unlimited power and desperately scatter its pieces around the world. But in 1972, computer expert Catherine "Cat" Velis is hired to recover the chess pieces--and is caught up in a nefarious, globe-spanning conspiracy.


Anne of Green Gables Montgomery
Anne, an 11-year-old orphan, has arrived at Prince Edward Island only to discover that the
Cuthberts want to adopt a boy, not a feisty red-haired girl. But Anne, who simply must have more scope for her imagination and a real home, wins them over.


Alive Read
True story about how a group of people who survived an airplane crash in the Andes had to resort to cannibalism in order to stay alive.


Of Mice and Men Steinbeck
Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him.


Bless the Beasts and the Children Swarthout
The neglected attendees of the Box Canyon Boys Camp find their lives turned around by Cotton, who, in a hot-wired pickup, challenges them to join efforts to save a herd of buffalo and rediscover themselves in the process.


Catcher in the Rye Salinger
Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.


Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is a classic novel set in the future when books forbidden by a totalitarian regime are burned. The hero, a book burner, suddenly discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas that cry out silently when put to the torch.


Cat's Cradle Vonnegut
Filled with humor and unforgettable characters, this apocalyptic story tells of Earth's ultimate end, and presents a vision of the future that is both darkly fantastic and funny, as Vonnegut weaves a satirical commentary on modern man and his madness.


The Horse Whisperer Evans
Annie Graves desperately travels across a continent with her injured daughter to see Tom Booker, the one man who can calm wild horses with his voice and heal broken spirits with his touch, to help her daughter, the girl's savage horse, and her own wounded heart.


The Doomsday Book Willis
Stranded in the fourteenth century--a time of superstition and fear--time traveler Kivrin becomes an unlikely angel of hope during history's darkest hour and awaits rescue by her comrades.



Shoeless Joe Kinsella
Like the movie Field of Dreams that was made from this novel, Shoeless Joe is about baseball. But it's also about love and the power of dreams to make people come alive.


Gone with the Wind Mitchell
A monumental classic considered by many to be not only the greatest love story ever written, but also the greatest Civil War saga.


Boone’s Lick McMurtry
Mary Margaret Cecil packs up her four children, including 15-year old Shay, and travels from their home in Boone’s Lick, Missouri, to find her estranged husband who has gone to the Western Frontier to find his fortune.


Seventh Son Card
The author of Ender's Game creates an alternative American frontier powered by folk magic where Native Americans remain powerful and a very special child is born.


Ender’s Shadow Card
The human race is at War with the "Buggers," an insect-like alien race. The first battles went badly, and now Earth prepares to defend itself from destruction by focusing on the development and training of military geniuses who can fight such a war, and win.




With a Tangled Skein Anthony
Niobe's only chance to save her family is to accept a challenge by the Prince of Deceit—a challenge to be decided in Hell and in a maze of Satan's devising!


The Eye of the Heron LeGuin
Luz leaves her City father to lead the People of Peace on a perilous quest to discover a world of hope within this world of chaos...a place they will call Heron.


Farewell to Manzanar Wakatsuki-Houston
During World War II, a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese Americans who were ordered to leave their homes and businesses. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew.


Dune Herbert
On the desert planet Arakis, Paul Atreides, becomes the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib. He avenges the traitorous plot against his noble family--and brings to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.


Anthem Rand
A classic tale of a future dark age of the great "We," in which individuals have no name, no independence, and no values, Anthem projects current social trends into the future.


The Old Man and the Sea Hemingway
An old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, engages in a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.


Sound of Waves Mishima
Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, a young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village.


Hiroshima Hersey
This is the story of six people who lived through the explosion of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima in 1945. New editions of this book contain an additional chapter in which the author, returning to Japan forty years later, tells us what has happened to each of these six survivors.


Diary of Anne Frank Frank
Anne Frank's classic diary describes hiding from the Nazis for two years in the “secret annex” with her family and friends. In the new edition where more of her diary is revealed, the Anne we meet is much more sarcastic, rebellious and vulnerable.


Middle Son Iida
Spencer Fujii, the 'middle son,' has returned to the island of his birth to cope with his dying mother and finally to face the facts of his elder brother Taizo's childhood death.


Maus: A Survivor’s Tale Spiegelman
Using a comic book format with human characters depicted as animals, Spiegelman presents his father Vladek's account of his life as a Jew in Poland when he arrived in Auschwitz.


Night Wiesel
Night is a terrifying account of the Nazi death camp horror that turns a young Jewish boy into an agonized witness to the death of his family.


The Invisible Man Wells
This highly imaginative tale focuses on the powers and bold ventures of a scientist, who, after discovering the means to make himself invisible, unleashes a bizarre streak of terror on the inhabitants of an English village.

A Separate Peace Knowles
Gene was a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas was a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happened between them at a New England boarding school one summer during the early years of World War II is the subject of A Separate Peace.


Hurricane: The Miraculous
Journey of Rubin Carter Hirsch
Hurricane is a detailed, inspiring account of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter's 22-year effort to exonerate himself and regain his freedom after being wrongly convicted of a triple murder.


Spindle’s End McKinley
Robin McKinley has a gift for the skillful retelling of folktales. In this novel, she has created a delightfully light, though never superficial, reimagining of Sleeping Beauty.



I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Angelou
In this first of five volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Marvelously told, with Angelou's "gift for language and observation," this "remarkable autobiography by an equally remarkable black woman from Arkansas captures, indelibly, a world of which most Americans are shamefully ignorant."


Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood Wells
When Siddalee Walker, daughter of Vivi Abbott Walker, is interviewed in the New York Times about a play she's directed, her mother gets described as a "tap-dancing child abuser." Enraged, Vivi disowns Sidda. Sidda begs forgiveness and postpones her upcoming wedding. All looks bleak until the Ya-Yas step in and convince Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of their girlhood mementos, called "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood." As Sidda struggles to analyze her mother, she comes face to face with the tangled beauty of imperfect love, and the fact that forgiveness, more than understanding, is often what the heart longs for.


All Creatures Great and Small Herriot
Take an unforgettable journey through the English countryside and into the homes of its inhabitants-- four-legged and otherwise-- with the world's best-loved animal doctor. Whether struggling mightily to position a calf for birthing or comforting a lonely old man whose beloved dog and only companion has died, Herriot's heartwarming and often hilarious stories of his first years as a country vet perfectly depict the wonderful relationship between man and animal-- and they intimately portray a man whose humor, compassion , and love of life are truly inspiring.


The Lovely Bones Sebold
When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. This was before milk carton photos and public service announcements, she tells us; back in 1973, when Susie mysteriously disappeared, people still believed these things didn't happen. Through the eyes of this winning young heroine, this story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful, touching, even funny novel about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.


Sophie’s World Gaarder
Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a mystery involving another young girl, Hilde, by using everything she's learning. The truth is far more complicated than she could ever have imagined.


The Clouds Above Grieg
The Clouds Aboveis a love story set during the Battle of Britain and a description of the battle itself. Drawing from his mother's diary chronicling her own experience during the Battle of Britain, Andrew Greig has written a novel that is as compelling a love story as it is a war story.