English 3 Book Club Options
Nickel and Dimed Barbara Ehrenreich In this non-fiction piece, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich leaves her comfortable life and decent salary to try to live on minimum wage in different parts of the United States. In each chapter, she travels to a new area to take on a new job such as a waitress, a hotel maid, a house cleaner, and a salesperson at Wal-Mart. In her experiment, she quickly finds out that trying to live solely on minimum wage is a very challenging endeavor. Caution: Mild language, brief references to drug use and sexual content.
The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Sallinger Though five English teachers could certainly tell you this book is about five vastly different concepts, most would agree it is certainly a beautiful and slightly uncomfortable read. This often-banned book explores a teenager coping with death and trying to make sense of a senseless and usually unfair world by figuring out social norms within our culture and what maturity might look like, amongst many other issues about growing up. Caution: language, sexuality
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey This novel is a story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially between the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, a fun-loving new inmate who decides to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a patient who witnesses McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them all imprisoned. Caution: language, violence, sexual content
Into the Wild John Krakauer Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild chronicles the real-life story of a young man and his desperate search to find out what it means to be alive and what ultimately awaits him at his journey’s end. This is the story of Chris McCandless who, through total abandonment of the standard civilized life, finds out what the American Dream really is for those brave enough to try to live it. Caution: Some language
The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien This novel, partially autobiographical, explores the Vietnam war and its aftermath through the personal stories of the men of Alpha Company. The structure, twenty-two linked stories, moves back and forth in time and between various characters’ perspectives. The novel looks not only at the effects of war, but on the way we treat each other as humans, and the way that memory affects our understanding of reality. Caution: language, violence, drugs (it’s wartime in Vietnam)
The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini “The Kite Runner was said to be the first novel written in English by an Afghan writer…The Kite Runner is the story of strained family relationships between a father and a son, and between two brothers, how they deal with guilt and forgiveness, and how they weather the political and social transformations of Afghanistan from the 1970s to 2001…The Kite Runner, a coming-of-age novel, deals with the themes of identity, loyalty, courage, and deception. As the protagonist Amir grows to adulthood, he must come to terms with his past wrongs and adjust to a new culture after leaving Afghanistan for the United States.” (from enotes.com) Caution: language, violence, sexual content
A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines The novel takes place in 1940s Louisiana when a young black man is unintentionally part of a robbery and shootout. He is sentenced to death, and at the request of his family, a local teacher tries to help him become a man who can die with dignity. The lessons, which affect the man, his teacher, and their community, involve racism, heroism, family, and pride. Caution: brief sexual content, language, racism