Newton Country Day School -> ACADEMICS -> Library -> Reading Suggestions -> US Reading Suggestions

Upper School Suggested Outside Reading 2013-2014

compiled by Mrs. Tuck, Upper School Librarian

What Do You Think?

Ashcroft, Frances. THE SPARK OF LIFE: ELECTRICITY IN THE HUMAN BODY.
Physiologist Ashcroft explains, in a lively mix of science and history, how everything we do depends on electrical events occurring continuously in nerve and muscle cells.

Climate Central. GLOBAL WEIRDNESS: SEVERE STORMS, DEADLY HEAT WAVES, RELENTLESS DROUGHT, RISING SEAS, AND THE WEATHER OF THE FUTURE.
Sets the record straight about the indisputable scientific evidence for global warming in this concise yet comprehensive overview.

Gay, Kathlyn. FOOD: THE NEW GOLD.
Well-researched presentation of worldwide issues related to food.

Murphy,Jim and Alison Blank. INVINCIBLE MICROBE: TUBERCULOSIS AND THE NEVER-ENDING SEARCH OF A CURE.
Traces the disease from a 500,000-year-old skull to modern-day triumphs and setbacks.

Quammen, David. SPILLOVER: ANIMAL INFECTIONS AND THE NEXT HUMAN PANDEMIC.
Illuminates fascinating, if scary, facts about zoonotic diseases-animal infections that sicken humans, such as influenza, SARS, and AIDS-and that can escalate rapidly into global pandemics.

Sacks, Oliver. HALLUCINATIONS.
In his latest foray in the human brain, sacks provides a broad panorama of the views and role of hallucinations through history.

Wortmann, Fletcher. TRIGGERED: A MEMOIR OF OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER.
Touching, candid, and often funny memoir recounts the author’s complex struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Who Are You?

Abbott, Megan. DARE ME.
Cheerleading squad captain, Beth, loses her power when a new coach arrives, until a suspicious death renews her opportunity for dominance.

Joyce, Rachel. THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY.
Retired salesman Harold Fry receives a letter from an old friend informing him that she’s dying. He dutifully writes a bland note of condolence and sets off for the nearest mailbox. Before he knows quite what he’s doing, he decides to walk the 627 miles to her hospice.

Meacham, Jon. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE ART OF POWER.
Follows Jefferson’s vision through the American Revolution, the doubling in size of the United States, and the establishment of a political dynasty of the next four decades.

Saenz, Benjamin Alire. ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE.
Ari is a solemn, angry Mexican American teen. A loner by choice, he remains enshrouded in his family’s tragic past and silent ways until Dante offers to teach him how to swim. The boys become fast friends.

Souder, William. ON A FARTHER SHORE: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF RACHEL CARSON.
Souder captures Carson’s passion for the natural environment and her pivotal role in bringing the problems causd by the “impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature” into the national consciousness.

Strayed, Cheryl. WILD: FROM LOST TO FOUND ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL.
The author hiked the trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she did it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.”

Classics

Bradbury, Ray. FAHRENHEIT 451.
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.

Golding, William. LORD OF THE FLIES.
The classic study of human nature which depicts the degeneration of a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island.

Hurston, Zora. Neale. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD.
Meet the unforgettable Janie Crawford, an articulate African-American woman in the 1930s. Traces Janie's quest for identity, through three marriages, on a journey to her roots.

Knowles, John. A SEPARATE PEACE.
A conflict of loyalties between Gene and his fearless friend, Phineas, leads to tragedy.

Orwell, George. ANIMAL FARM.
A satire on totalitarianism in which farm animals overthrow their human owner and set up their own government.

Remarque, Erich Maria. ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.
The testament of Paul Baumer, who enlists with his classmates in the German army of World War I, illuminates the savagery and futility of war.

Steinbeck, John. OF MICE AND MEN.
The tragic story of two itinerant ranch hands on the run--one is the lifelong companion to the other, a developmentally disabled man.

Weisel, Ellie. NIGHT.
The narrative of a boy who lived through Auschwitz and Buchenwald provide a short and terrible indictment of modern humanity.

Newsworthy

Boo, Katherine. BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS: LIFE, DEATH, AND HOPE IN A MUMBAI UNDERCITY.
Jolts the consciousness with the opposing realities of poverty and wealth in a searing visit to the Annawaldi settlement, a flimflam slum that has recently sprung up in the western suburbs of the gigantic city of Mumbai, India.

Dau, Stephen. BOOK OF JONAS.
When his family is killed during an errant U.S. military operation in the Middle East, fifteen-year-old Jonas is sent to live with a foster family in America and struggles to adapt before revealing the heroics of a missing soldier who saved his life.

McCormick, Patricia. NEVER FALL DOWN.
Separated from his family and assigned to a labor camp when soldiers invade his home in Cambodia, young Arn volunteers to become a musician for the army and uses his wits to survive and steal food for other child prisoners before he is conscripted as a boy soldier.

Powers, Kevin. THE YELLOW BIRDS.
In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.

Purcell, Kim. TRAFFICKED.
A 17-year-old Moldovan girl whose parents have been killed is brought to the United States to work as a slave for a family in Los Angeles.

Schrefer, Eliot. ENDANGERED.
Reluctantly accompanying her advocate mother to a bonobo sanctuary, a teen girl participates in a desperate effort to rescue the bonobos and survive in the jungle when a revolution breaks out and the sanctuary is attacked.

Where in the World?

Farish, Terry. THE GOOD BRAIDER.
Viola and her family journey through war-torn Sudan, impoverished Cairo, and finally strange and alien Portland, Maine, trying to escape the horrors witnessed and experienced back home.

Houston, Jeanne. FAREWELL TO MANZANAR.
The true story of one spirited Japanese-American family's attempt to survive the indignities of forced detention . . . and of a native-born American child who discovered what it was like to grow up behind barbed wire in the United States.

Johnson, Adam. ORPHAN MASTER’S SON.
A richly, textured political thriller about the hidden world of North Korea with all of its misery, violence and defiant acts of love under impossible circumstances.Marr,

Melissa et al. SHARDS AND ASHES.
Gripping and powerful original stories of dystopian worlds.

McCulloch, Derek. GONE TO AMERIKAY.
Three intertwined stories reveal both individual and generational experiences by disparate immigrants to New York city from Ireland, in 1870, 1960, and 2010.

Munro, Alice. DEAR LIFE. A collection of stories illuminates moments that shape a life, from a dream to simple twists of fate, and is set in the countryside and towns of Lake Huron.Pitcher, Annabel. MY SISTER LIVES ON THE MANTELPIECE.
Ten-year-old Jamie’s sister, along with 61 others, was killed during a terrorist attack by Islamic extremists on Trafalgar Square, and her tragic death shatters her parents’ lives.

VanderMeer, Ann.STEAMPUNK.
Begins in the romantic elegance of the Victorian era and blends in modern scientific advances—synthesizing imaginative technologies such as steam-driven robots, analog supercomputers, and ultramodern dirigibles.

Is This Love?

Brunt, Carol Rifka. TELL THE WOLVES I’M HOME.
In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them.

Du Maurier, Daphne. REBECCA.
A classic novel of romantic suspense finds the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter entering the home of her mysterious and enigmatic new husband and learning the story of the house's first mistress, to whom the sinister housekeeper is unnaturally devoted.

Laban, Elizabeth. THE TRAGEDY PAPER.
The story of Tim Macbeth, a seventeen-year-old albino and a recent transfer to the prestigious Irving School, where the motto is “Enter here to be and find a friend.” A friend is the last thing Tim expects or wants—he just hopes to get through his senior year unnoticed.

McEwan. Ian. SWEET TOOTH.
Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.

Smith, Jennifer. THE STATISTICAL PROBABILITY OF LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.
Seventeen-year-old Hadley's father is getting remarried, and while Hadley is (much) less than thrilled about it, she's traveling to England to be a part of his wedding. After missing her flight to London by just four minutes, Hadley gets rebooked on another flight...where she meets Oliver.

Turnbull, Ann.NO SHAME, NO FEAR.
In England in 1662, a time of religious persecution, fifteen-year-old Susanna, a poor country girl and a Quaker, and seventeen-year-old William, a wealthy Anglican, meet and fall in love against all odds.

From the Past

Bohjalian, Chris. THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS.
When Laura petrosian, a contemporary new York novelist, decides to find out more about her Bostonian grandmother and her Armenian grandfather, she delves into the horrors of the Armenian Genocide.

Chevalier, Tracy. THE LAST RUNAWAY.
An English Quaker woman’s involvement in the Underground Railroad in 19^th-century America.

McMullan, Margaret. HOW I FOUND THE STRONG.
Frank Russell, known as Shanks, wishes he could have gone with his father and brother to fight for Mississippi and the Confederacy, but his experiences with the war and his changing relationship with the family slave, Buck, change his thinking.

Naidoo, Beverley. BURN MY HEART.
Two boys--one white, one black--share an uneasy friendship in Kenya in the 1950s, a country shaken by a rebellion of Africans against white landowners, but suspicions and accusations are escalating, and an act of betrayal could change everything.

Park, Linda Sue. WHEN MY NAME WAS KEOKO.
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

Wein, Elizabeth. CODE NAME VERITY.
After Verity is arrested by the Gestapo, her plight is dire:as a secret agent captured in enemy territory-Nazi-occupied france-she has two weeks to reveal her mission or be brutally executed.

Wells, Rosemary. RED MOON AT SHARPSBURG.
Finding courage she never thought she had, a young Southern girl musters the strength and wit to survive the ravages of the Civil War and keep her family together through it all.

Thrillers and Chillers

Bray, Libba. THE DIVINERS.
When spirited flapper Evie O’Neill moves to New York City, she meets other people who also have supernatural abilities.

Cashore, Kristin. BITTERBLUE.
Eighteen-year-old Bitterblue, queen of Monsea, realizes her heavy responsibility and the futility of relying on advisors who surround her with lies as she tries to help her people to heal from the thirty-five-year spell cast by her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities.

Levithan, David. EVERY DAY.
Each morning A inhabits a different body and has learned not to get too involved in or possessive of the host’s life.

Stanley, Diane. THE CUP AND THE CROWN.
A sequel to The Silver Bowl finds Molly enlisted by handsome King Alaric to help find a loving cup that will enable him to win the heart of a beautiful princess, a quest that brings Molly and her friends to a hidden city where she discovers magical family secrets.

Stiefvater, Maggie. RAVEN BOYS.
Though she is from a family of clairvoyants, Blue Sargent's only gift seems to be that she makes other people's talents stronger, and when she meets Gansey, one of the Raven Boys from the expensive Aglionby Academy, she discovers that he has talents of his own--and that together their talents are a dangerous mix.

Walker, Karen T. AGE OF MIRACLES.
Imagines the coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.

Real Life

Arcos, Carrie. OUT OF REACH.
Accompanied by her brother's friend, Tyler, 16-year-old Rachel ventures through San Diego and nearby areas seeking her brother, 18-year-old Micah, a methamphetamine addict who ran away from home.

Cadnum, Michael. SEIZE THE STORM.
On a pleasure cruise in the Pacific, seventeen-year-old Susannah, her parents, seventeen-year-old cousin Martin, and eighteen-year-old crew member Axel face off against seventeen-year-old Jeremy, a drug lord's son, and hired killers Elwood and fifteen-year-old Shako.

Doughty, Louise. WHATEVER YOU LOVE.
When the hit-and-run incident that claimed her daughter's life is ruled an accident, Laura decides to take matters into her own hands and track down the man responsible, which has disastrous consequences and drives her to a dangerous breaking point.

Follett, Ken. FALL OF GIANTS.
Follows the fates of five interrelated families--American, German, Russian, English and Welsh--as they move through the world-shaking dramas of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.

Morrison, Toni. HOME.
Frank is an angry, broken veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. He is shocked out of his apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and taker her back to the small Georgia town them come from and that he's hated all his life.

Otto, Whitney. EIGHT GIRLS TAKING PICTURES.
A tale inspired by the lives of famous twentieth-century female photographers traces the progression of feminism and photography in various world regions as each woman explores private and public goals while balancing the demands of family and creativity.

Could It Be?

Hill, Susan. WOMEN IN BLACK.
Arthur Kipps, a young solicitor, travels to the north of England to settle the estate of Alice Drablow, but unexpectedly encounters a series of sinister events.

Jaramillo, Ann. LA LINEA.
When fifteen-year-old Miguel's time finally comes to leave his poor Mexican village, cross the border illegally, and join his parents in California, his younger sister's determination to join him soon imperils them both.

Mussi, Sarah. THE DOOR OF NO RETURN.
Sixteen-year-old Zac Baxter never believed his grandfather's tales about their enslaved ancestors being descended from an African king, but when his grandfather is murdered and the villains come after Zac, he sets out for Ghana to find King Baktu's long-lost treasure before the murderers do.

Oppel, Kenneth. STARCLIMBER.
As members of the first crew of astralnauts, Matt Cruse and Kate De Vries journey into outer space on the Starclimber and face a series of catastrophes that threaten the survival of all on board.

Picoult, Jodi. THE STORYTELLER.
Sage Singer, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, befriends a beloved old man in her community. Then he revelas his dark secret regarding his whereabouts during World War II-and asks her to kill him.

Smith, Roland. PEAK.
A fourteen-year-old boy attempts to be the youngest person to reach the top of Mount Everest.

Walker, Karen Thompson. THE AGE OF MIRACLES.
Just before Julia’s 12^th birthday, scientists announce that the Earth’s rotation is slowing. The unraveling of life on the planet is told from the perspective of one girl living in an ordinary California neighborhood.

Choices

Erdrich, Louise. THE ROUND HOUSE.
A woman is raped and beaten on an Ojibwe reservation; her 13-year-old son decides to investigate.

Green, John. THE FAULT IN OUR STARS.
Hazel Lancaster, 16, has been battling thyroid cancer for three years. The lonely, oxygen tank-toting teenager joins a support group for ill teens and meets Augustus, a 17-year-old cancer survivor with a prosthetic leg.

Hopkins, Ellen. PERFECT.
Four high school seniors will do anything to be perfect. But then Cara, Conner’s Stanford-bound sister, starts to rebel against her overbearing parents’ unrealistic expectations.

Miller, Madeline. SONG OF ACHILLES.
In this new twist on the Trojan War story, Patroclus and Achilles are the quintessential mismatched pair--a mortal underdog exiled in shame and a glorious demigod revered by all--but what would a novel of ancient Greece be without star-crossed love?

Pfeffer, Susan Beth. THIS WORLD WE LIVE IN.
When the moon's gravitational pull increases, causing massive natural disasters on earth, Miranda and her family struggle to survive in a world without cities or sunlight, and wonder if anyone else in still alive.

Rash, Ron. THE COVE.
Living deep in the isolated mountains of Appalachia just after World War I, Laurel believes her loneliness may be finally over when a mute young man suddenly appears in their dark, secluded cove.

Ward, Jessmyn. SALVAGE THE BONES.
Told in 12 chapters-the ten days preceding Hurricane Katrina, the day of the hurricane, and the day after it, this novel explores one family’s deep bonds and terrible plight amid even greater tragedy

And More Choices

Gordon, Jaimy. LORD OF MISRULE.
Captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track .

Greenblatt, Stephen. THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN.
An innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Hinwood, Christine. THE RETURNING.
Cam Attling, having lost an arm, is the only one from his town of Kayforl to return after twelve years of war. All his fellow soldiers were slain, and suspicion surrounds him.

Shadid,Anthony. HOUSE OF STONE: A MEMOIR OF HOME, FAMILY, AND A LOST MIDDLE EAST.
In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all

Silvey, Craig. JASPER JONES.
Charlie Bucktin, a bookish thirteen year old, is startled one summer night by an urgent knock on his bedroom window. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in their small mining town, and he has come to ask for Charlie's help.

Walton, Jo. AMONG OTHERS.
Raised by a half-mad mother who dabbled in magic, Morwenna Phelps found refuge in two worlds. As a child growing up in Wales, she played among the spirits who made their homes in industrial ruins.

Whaley, John Corey. WHERE THINGS COME BACK.
In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town.