Summer Reading List

Kyle

"There were things I did at Kent that I never thought I would-drama, for example..." Read More

Tim Booth

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

Lauren & Elaina

Elaina and I came to Kent for the flexibility. There are so many great subjects here... Read More

Summer Reading, Required and Suggested

All Kent students taking regular and honors classes are required to read Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle this summer. Students who will enter the ESL program should read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

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,W.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