Summer Reading Ideas for Secondary-School Students

From the Marshall Memo #432

“What summer reading needs to be is purposeful,” says New York City middle-school teacher Claire Needell Hollander in this New York Times article. “But how do we ensure purposeful independent reading given the low accountability of summer assignments? …Reading literature should be intentional. The problem with much summer reading is that the intention is unclear.” 

Younger students don’t need a lot of direction, she believes, since pretty much anything they read over the summer, including comics, will build their vocabularies and knowledge of the world. But middle- and high-school students need more structure if they are going to return in the fall with bigger vocabularies and more curiosity about the world around them. Hollander suggests sending older students off with a carefully-chosen list and not requiring book reports and sticky notes. She believes that accessible non-fiction books are more helpful than fiction – for example, reading The Red Badge of Courage adds more value than the Hunger Games series. 

“Reading serious nonfiction in the summer is an immersion in the world of necessary ideas,” she says. “Students who have immersed themselves in real-world problems become excited by current events and history as well as literature. They can make connections between academic areas that are ordinarily divided. They will understand Dickens better for having read Iqbal, which tells the story of a boy who is sold into slavery at a carpet factory.” 

For middle school students, Hollander suggests:

• Facing the Lion by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton with Herman Viola;
• A Long Way Home by Ishmael Beah;
• Iqbal by Francesco D’Adamo and Ann Leonori (a novel about a real person).

For upper-middle-school and high-school students:

• Hiroshima by John Hersey;
• Night by Elie Wiesel;
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser;
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan;
• Girls Like Us by Rachel Lloyd;
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo.

“These nonfiction books provoke students to desire an expanded world knowledge, to consider the flawed moral decision-making of the past and the imperiled morality of the future,” concludes Hollander. “They all contain high-level vocabulary, but not so much that a typical student might fail to grasp major points.” 

“Some Books Are More Equal Than Others” by Claire Needell Hollander in The New York Times, June 24, 2012, http://nyti.ms/L5XuiU