Summer Reading List

Patrick

"When I came to Kent, I felt a little intimidated by the precedent my brother had set. He'd done really well..." Read More

Tim Booth

One of the things I love about Kent is that the community is really tightly knit... Read More

Emily

"I came here for the academics. I wanted to be challenged..." Read More

Summer Reading, Required and Suggested

All Kent students taking regular and honors classes and ESL students are required to read Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone this summer.

The required reading is just a start to a full summer's worth; the following books have given both students and teachers pleasure over the years. Read!

Classics to read before college
Austen, Jane: Emma
Bronte, Charlotte: Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily: Wuthering Heights
Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland, Alice Through the Looking-Glass
Dickens, Charles: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist
Dostoevsky, Fyodor: Crime and Punishment
Faulkner, William: Light in August
Fielding, Henry: The Adventures of Tom Jones
Hardy, Thomas: The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native
Homer, The Odyssey (the Fagles translation)
Melville, Herman: Moby Dick
Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina
Virgil, The Aeneid
Wharton, Edith: Ethan Frome

Great books for summer reading
Austen, Jane: Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park
Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe
Eliot, George: The Mill on the Floss
Follett, Kenneth: Pillars of the Earth
Golding, William: The Lord of the Flies
Hamsun, Knut: Growth of the Soil
Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany
Ishiguro, Kazuo: Remains of the Day
Jenkins, Elizabeth: Elizabeth the Great
Lewis, C.S.: Out of the Silent Planet, Till We Have Faces
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Morrison, Toni: Beloved
Orwell, George: 1984, Animal Farm
Paton, Alan: Cry, the Beloved Country
Pirsig, Robert: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Shaw, G.B.: St. Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, The Devil’s Disciple
Smiley, Jane: A Thousand Acres
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Wouk, Herman: The Caine Mutiny

Books people enjoy re-reading
Cervantes: Don Quixote
Didion, Joan: Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Hardy, Thomas: Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Knowles, John: A Separate Peace
Lewis, C. S.: The Narnia books
Salinger,J.D.: Nine Stories, Catcher in the Rye
Turgenev, Ivan: Fathers and Sons
Verne, Jules: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited
Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wolfe, Thomas: Look Homeward, Angel