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As a head of school, I was always looking for ways to have conversations with students that had some relationship to what they were studying. A good place to start was to ask what they were reading in their literature class. W hile head of a boarding school where I would often have meals with students three times a day I had lots of time for conversation.

To prepare, I would ask the teachers teaching the English (and French and Spanish too) literature courses the works they would be reading with their students and then be sure to read them over the summer. In a single IB World School, that made for a reasonable summer reading list and led to some great conversations.

As the Chief Academic Officer of the IB, I knew I could not do the same thing with thousands of schools around the world but I was curious to find out what were the most commonly read works in IB World Schools. To do this, I looked at the works chosen by IB Language A literature (in English to start) teachers in 2016.

For those not familiar with the IB literature course, over two years, students read either ten or thirteen literary works depending on whether they are taking the course at standard or higher level. They study these in different genres, some chosen from a long list of prescribed authors and works in translation. And three can be freely chosen from any literary work ever written.

This allows teachers and students to tailor their reading to their own unique contexts and interests. Ideally, the works are chosen to complement what the students are studying in their other IB courses like history or anthropology. With all this flexibility of choice and so many options, the reading lists vary dramatically from school to school and can be different within the same school when multiple sections of the literature course are offered.

Is there any pattern? Not in terms of schools choosing the same combination of books. There are about as many combinations as there are IB World Schools. There is no IB canon. Haruki Murakami reminds us that "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." We certainly don't want that. It is through a variety of literature that you can experience and explore that final sentence of the IB mission that states the aim of IB programmes is to "encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right."

Even with all the options, across all IB World Schools, it was possible to see which works are the most commonly chosen.

Here are the top ten most commonly read works, across all genres in all IB World Schools

1. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

4. Macbeth, William Shakespeare

5. Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

6. Othello, William Shakespeare

7. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

8. The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

9. Poetry of Robert Frost

10. Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy

The top ten most commonly read novels written in English
(excluding The Great Gatsby and Things Fall Apart mentioned above)

1. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

2. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

3. 1984, George Orwell

4. The Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

5. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

6. The Things They Carried, Tim Obrien

7. Beloved, Toni Morrison

8. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austin

9. The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

11. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (tied with Jane Eyre!)

The top ten most commonly read novels in translation

1. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. The Stranger, Albert Camus

3. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

4. Perfume, Patrick Suskind

5. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

6. Woman at Point Zero, Newal El Saadawi

7. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

8. The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

9. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevski

10. Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz

The literature course, as described in the IB guide is: built on the assumption that literature is concerned with our conceptions, interpretations and experiences of the world. The study of literature can therefore be seen as an exploration of the way it represents the complex pursuits, anxieties, joys and fears to which human beings are exposed in the daily business of living.

These top ten lists are, of course, influenced by the location of the schools that offer the IB Diploma, about one-third of them are located in the United States and Canada. And there are many teachers whose chosen ten or thirteen literary works do not contain a single one of the works found in these top ten lists.

If you have not read any of these works, this summer/winter might be a good time to start. Even if you read them when in school, they will be a new experience for you today. Just think of 1984 and explore anew. Or choose a novel written in 1985 that seems particularly fitting for 2017: The Handmaid's Tale. I started with one I was unfamiliar with, Woman at Point Zero and it is the most powerful thing I have read so far this year. Yes, if you choose from these lists you might have something in common with an IB student.
David Hawley is the Chief Academic Officer at the IB.

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As a head of school, I was always looking for ways to have conversations with students that had some relationship to what they were studying. A good place to start was to ask what they were reading in their literature class.

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A full program of works 9-12 at an IB school

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A full program of works 9-12 at an IB school

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(It says IB because they have a Middle Years Programme)

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Another school with one-stop shopping for ALL the reading lists (not just summer), AND the school includes college-readiness book choices for summer reading for FRESHMEN!!!

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Another school with one-stop shopping for ALL the reading lists (not just summer), AND the school includes college-readiness book choices for summer reading for FRESHMEN!!!

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Books listed include required summer reading as well as books needed for assignments during the 2019-20 school year- see list for designation. Students may opt to purchase those needed for the coming school year in advance or wait until they are needed during the academic year. All books on the list include the ISBN# to ease finding the correct book edition.
Parent Tip: Be sure to purchase the correct book edition! Many books have alternative editions available. Your student will need the specific edition listed for their assigments. Use the ISBN# listed in the chart.
Rising 11th Graders: The assigned summer reading title Kitchen is difficult to find. Don't wait to order. Rising 12th Graders: please note Brodeck in translation is difficult to find. It is strongly recommended you purchase before school year begins.
RHS IB Book List 2019 revised 5.31.19
Robinson IB Summer Assignments
Rising 9th Grade (Class of 2023) Rising 10th Grade (Class of 2022) Rising 11th Grade (Class of 2021) Rising 12th Grade (Class of 2020)

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Books listed include required summer reading as well as books needed for assignments during the 2019-20 school year- see list for designation. Students may opt to purchase those needed for the coming school year in advance or wait until they are needed during the academic year.

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One School's Entire Summer Reading Assignment from 5th grade through 12th grade AP AND IB in ONE document!

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One School's Entire Summer Reading Assignment from 5th grade through 12th grade AP AND IB in ONE document!

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Leander High School Pre-AP 9th-grade summer reading assignment

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Leander High School Pre-AP 9th-grade summer reading assignment

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The College Board's Pre-Ap Course Framework!

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The College Board's Pre-Ap Course Framework!

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Pre-AP English 1 focuses on reading, writing, and language skills that are relevant to students' current work and essential for students' future to future high school and college coursework.

Texts take center stage, preparing students for close, critical reading and analytical writing. The course trains readers to observe small details in a text to arrive at a deeper understanding of the whole. It also trains writers to create complex sentences-building this foundational skill en route to sophisticated, longer-form analyses.

Areas of Focus

The Pre-AP English areas of focus are vertically aligned to the practices embedded in high school and college English courses, including AP. This gives students multiple opportunities to prioritize and strengthen key literacy skills throughout their course of study.

Reading closely: Students read closely and analyze a range of complex literary and informational texts.

Valuing evidence: Students evaluate textual evidence and incorporate it effectively in writing and speaking.

Noticing language choices: Students understand how writers and speakers use specific words and sentences to move the thoughts, emotions, and actions of readers and listeners.

Unit Foundations

These big ideas are integrated across all units:

Engaging with texts

Constructing texts

Focusing on language

Investigating through research

Entering the conversation

Course at a Glance

Pre-AP English 1 has four main units. Their key topics and recommended length are outlined here:

Unit 1: Telling Details (~7 weeks)

Unit 2: Pivotal Words and Phrases (~7 weeks)

Unit 3: Compelling Evidence (~7 weeks)

Unit 4: Powerful Openings (~7 weeks)

Instructional Resources

These resources support teachers as they design instruction for each unit, but do not constitute a full day-by-day curriculum. They are intended to be used alongside local school or district materials to address objectives of the course framework:

Course framework: An anchor for model lessons and assessments, the framework defines what students should know and be able to do by the end of the course. Teachers can use this as the primary document to align instruction and course content.

Teacher resources: Available in print and online, these include a robust set of model lessons that demonstrate how to translate the course framework, shared principles, and areas of focus into daily instruction.

Assessments for Learning

Each unit contains:

In-lesson formatives: short writing tasks in which students demonstrate understanding of a text or concept discussed in class (scored by teachers).

2 learning checkpoints: short online assessments in which students apply learning to texts not studied in class (automated scoring and reporting).

1 performance task: a written response to a text not studied in class (scored by teachers, with provided scoring guidelines).

A final exam is provided as a summative assessment that allows students to demonstrate their success with the learning objectives outlined in the course framework. This exam is optional. Pre-AP has not offered practice exams or published exam questions from prior years.

Quill and College Board have partnered to provide students with meaningful practice of sentence-level writing skills. Visit the Quill Official Pre-AP English Practice page to view the resources that have been custom-built for Pre-AP English.

The New Book Press and College Board have partnered to provide all Pre-AP teachers and students with access to WordPlay Shakespeare for Romeo and Juliet (Pre-AP English 1) and Macbeth (Pre-AP English 2). Visit the WordPlay Pre-AP page for more information and resources.

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Pre-AP English 1 focuses on reading, writing, and language skills that are relevant to students' current work and essential for students' future to future high school and college coursework. Texts take center stage, preparing students for close, critical reading and analytical writing.

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Some works are far too difficult here, but some from 1940-onward could work.

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A lot of students wonder if there's a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Composition exam. While there's not an official College-Board AP reading list, there are books that will be more useful for you to read than others as you prepare for the exam. In this article, I'll break down why you need to read books to prepare, how many you should plan on reading, and what you should read-including poetry.

2020 AP Test Changes Due to COVID-19

Due to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, AP tests will now be held remotely, and information about how that will work is still evolving. Stay up to date with the latest information on test dates, AP online review, and what this means for you with our AP COVID-19 FAQ article.

Why Do You Need to Read Books for the AP Literature Test?

This might seem like kind of an obvious question-you need to read books because it's a literature exam! But actually, there are three specific reasons why you need to read novels, poems, and plays in preparation for the AP Lit Test.

To Increase Your Familiarity With Different Eras and Genres of Literature

Reading a diverse array of novels, poetry and plays from different eras and genres will help you be familiar with the language that appears in the various passages on the AP Lit exam's multiple choice and essay sections. If you read primarily modern works, for example, you may stumble through analyzing a Shakespeare sonnet. So, having a basic familiarity level with the language of a broad variety of literary works will help keep you from floundering in confusion on test day because you're seeing a work unlike anything you've ever read.

To Improve Your Close-Reading Skills

You'll also want to read to improve your close-reading and rhetorical analysis skills. When you do read, really engage with the text: think about what the author's doing to construct the novel/poem/play/etc., what literary techniques and motifs are being deployed, and what major themes are at play. You don't necessarily need to drill down to the same degree on every text, but you should always be thinking, "Why did the author write this piece this way?"

For the Student Choice Free-Response Question

Perhaps the most critical piece in reading to prepare for the AP Lit test, however, is for the student choice free-response question. For the third question on the second exam section, you'll be asked to examine how a specific theme works in one novel or play that you choose. The College Board does provide an example list of works, but you can choose any work you like just so long as it has adequate "literary merit." However, you need to be closely familiar with more than one work so that you can be prepared for whatever theme the College Board throws at you!

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Note: Not an effective reading method.
How Many Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam?

That depends. In terms of reading to increase your familiarity with literature from different eras and genres and to improve your close-reading skills, the more books you have time to read, the better. You'll want to read them all with an eye for comprehension and basic analysis, but you don't necessarily need to focus equally on every book you read.

For the purposes of the student choice question, however, you'll want to read books more closely, so that you could write a detailed, convincing analytical essay about any of their themes. So you should know the plot, characters, themes, and major literary devices or motifs used inside and out. Since you won't know what theme you'll be asked to write about in advance, you'll need to be prepared to write a student choice question on more than just one book.

Of the books you read for prep both in and out of class, choose four to five books that are thematically diverse to learn especially well in preparation for the exam. You may want to read these more than once, and you certainly want to take detailed notes on everything that's going on in those books to help you remember key points and themes. Discussing them with a friend or mentor who has also read the book will help you generate ideas on what's most interesting or intriguing about the work and how its themes operate in the text.

You may be doing some of these activities anyways for books you are assigned to read for class, and those books might be solid choices if you want to be as efficient as possible. Books you write essays about for school are also great choices to include in your four to five book stable since you will be becoming super-familiar with them for the writing you do in class anyways.

In answer to the question, then, of how many books you need to read for the AP Lit exam: you need to know four to five inside and out, and beyond that, the more the better!
Know the books. Love the books.
What Books Do You Need to Read for the AP Exam?

The most important thing for the student choice free-response question is that the work you select needs to have "literary merit." What does this mean? In the context of the College Board, this means you should stick with works of literary fiction. So in general, avoid mysteries, fantasies, romance novels, and so on.

If you're looking for ideas, authors and works that have won prestigious prizes like the Pulitzer, Man Booker, the National Book Award, and so on are good choices. Anything you read specifically for your AP literature class is a good choice, too. If you aren't sure if a particular work has the kind of literary merit the College Board is looking for, ask your AP teacher.

When creating your own AP Literature reading list for the student choice free-response, try to pick works that are diverse in author, setting, genre, and theme. This will maximize your ability to comprehensively answer a student choice question about pretty much anything with one of the works you've focused on.

So, I might, for example, choose:

As you can see, while there is some thematic overlap in my chosen works, they also cover a broad swathe of themes. They are also all very different in style (although you'll just have to take my word on that one unless you go look at all of them yourself), and they span a range of time periods and genres as well.

However, while there's not necessarily a specific, mandated AP Literature reading list, there are books that come up again and again on the suggestion lists for student choice free-response questions. When a book comes up over and over again on exams, this suggests both that it's thematically rich, so you can use it to answer lots of different kinds of questions, and that the College Board sees a lot of value in the work.

To that end, I've assembled a list, separated by time period, of all the books that have appeared on the suggested works list for student choice free-response questions at least twice since 2003. While you certainly shouldn't be aiming to read all of these books (there's way too many for that!), these are all solid choices for the student choice essay. Other books by authors from this list are also going to be strong choices. It's likely that some of your class reading will overlap with this list, too.

I've divided up the works into chunks by time period. In addition to title, each entry includes the author, whether the work is a novel, play, or something else, and when it was first published or performed. Works are alphabetical by author.
Warning: Not all works pictured included in AP Literature reading list below.
Ancient Works

1500-1799

1800-1899
The Queen of AP Literature surveys her kingdom.
1900-1939

1940-1969
Don't get trapped in a literature vortex!
1970-1989

1990-Present
Don't stay in one reading position for too long, or you'll end up like this guy.
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An Addendum on Poetry

You probably won't be writing about poetry on your student choice essay-most just aren't meaty enough in terms of action and character to merit a full-length essay on the themes when you don't actually have the poem in front of you (a major exception being The Odyssey). That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be reading poetry, though! You should be reading a wide variety of poets from different eras to get comfortable with all the varieties of poetic language. This will make the poetry analysis essay and the multiple-choice questions about poetry much easier!

See this list of poets compiled from the list given on page 10 of the AP Course and Exam Description for AP Lit, separated out by time period. For those poets who were working during more than one of the time periods sketched out below, I tried to place them in the era in which they were more active.

I've placed an asterisk next to the most notable and important poets in the list; you should aim to read one or two poems by each of the starred poets to get familiar with a broad range of poetic styles and eras.

14th-17th Centuries

1. Anne Bradstreet

2. Geoffrey Chaucer

3. John Donne

4. George Herbert

5. Ben Jonson

6. Andrew Marvell

7. John Milton

8. William Shakespeare*

18th-19th Centuries

1. William Blake*

2. Robert Browning

3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge*

4. Emily Dickinson*

5. Paul Laurence Dunbar

6. George Gordon, Lord Byron

7. Gerard Manley Hopkins

8. John Keats*

9. Edgar Allan Poe*

10. Alexander Pope*

11. Percy Bysshe Shelley*

12. Alfred, Lord Tennyson*

13. Walt Whitman*

14. William Wordsworth*

Early-Mid 20th Century

1. W. H. Auden

2. Elizabeth Bishop

3. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

4. T. S. Eliot*

5. Robert Frost*

6. Langston Hughes*

7. Philip Larkin

8. Robert Lowell

9. Marianne Moore

10. Sylvia Plath*

11. Anne Sexton*

12. Wallace Stevens

13. William Carlos Williams

14. William Butler Yeats*

Late 20th Century-Present

1. Edward Kamau Brathwaite

2. Gwendolyn Brooks

3. Lorna Dee Cervantes

4. Lucille Clifton

5. Billy Collins

6. Rita Dove

7. Joy Harjo

8. Seamus Heaney

9. Garrett Hongo

10. Adrienne Rich

11. Leslie Marmon Silko

12. Cathy Song

13. Derek Walcott

14. Richard Wilbur

You might rather burn books than read them after the exam, but please refrain.
Key Takeaways

Why do you need to read books to prepare for AP Lit? For three reasons:

#1: To become familiar with a variety of literary eras and genres
#2: To work on your close-reading skills
#3: To become closely familiar with four-five works for the purposes of the student choice free-response essay analyzing a theme in a work of your choice.

How many books do you need to read? Well, you definitely need to get very familiar with four-five for essay-writing purposes, and beyond that, the more the better!

Which books should you read? Check out the AP English Literature reading list in this article to see works that have appeared on two or more "suggested works" lists on free-response prompts since 2003.

And don't forget to read some poetry too! See some College Board recommended poets listed in this article.

What's Next?

See my expert guide to the AP Literature test for more exam tips!

The multiple-choice section of the AP Literature exam is a key part of your score. Learn everything you need to know about it in our complete guide to AP Lit multiple-choice questions.

Taking other APs? Check out our expert guides to the AP Chemistry exam, AP US History, AP World History, AP Psychology, and AP Biology.

Looking for other book recommendation lists from PrepScholar? We've compiled lists of the 7 books you must read if you're a pre-med and the 31 books to read before graduating high school.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

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AP Literature Reading List: 127 Great Books for Your Prep

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A lot of students wonder if there's a specific AP English reading list of books they should be reading to succeed on the AP Literature and Composition exam. While there's not an official College-Board AP reading list, there are books that will be more useful for you to read than others as you prepare for the exam.

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Pre-AP Summer Reading Assignment Anderson High

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Pre-AP Summer Reading Assignment Anderson High