FortifyFL
THEME: Choice
All lives are composed of an endless stream of choices, some easy to make and some incredibly difficult. Oftentimes when faced with choices, our decisions are limited by external factors – predetermined rules, social norms, or expectations of others – and the decisions we make can have drastic consequences, both to ourselves and to others. In these scenarios, should we stand firm in our convictions, or should we appease the ideas of others? What are the consequences of choice to ourselves and to others? At the end of the day, do we really even have that much of a choice over our fates, or is there little we can do to alter the course of our lives?
Grade 9
This year, Archimedean Upper Conservatory’s summer assignments will be focused on the theme of individual choice. Demonstrating individual choice may include the following:
- You are not afraid to experiment.
- You believe that destiny is not a real thing.
- You do not let others dictate how to live your life.
- You are unique.
- You are self-reliant.
- You believe in your own rights and freedom.
- You make choices to get through difficult situations
For your summer assignment, you will have one required novel, AND a second novel of your choice from the provided list.
Antigone by Sophocles
ISBN: 9780486278049
An Ancient Greek tragedy that tells the story of Antigone who decides to give her dishonored brother a proper funeral, going against the king’s law and suffering the consequences.
Persuasion by Jane Austen
ISBN: 0141439688
Jane Austen’s final novel tells the story of Anne Elliot, a young woman who broke her engagement off after being persuaded by friends and family, and how she has spent the eight years following that decision. When the two finally meet again, will she get a chance to make a new decision?
The Plague by Albert Camus
ISBN: 0679720219
Inspired by the Algerian cholera epidemic of 1849, Camus tells a story of the people of Oran and what happens when a whole town experiences a hopeless situation. What decisions can be made when all seems lost, and do they even matter?
Grade 10
This year, Archimedean Upper Conservatory’s summer assignments will be focused on the theme of individual choice. Demonstrating individual choice may include the following:
- You are not afraid to experiment.
- You believe that destiny is not a real thing.
- You do not let others dictate how to live your life.
- You are unique.
- You are self-reliant.
- You believe in your own rights and freedom.
- You make choices to get through difficult situations
For your summer assignment, you will have one required novel, AND a second novel of your choice from the provided list.
Crying in H-Mart by Michelle Zauner
ISBN: 978-1984898951
A memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
ISBN: 978-0062277756
Clear-eyed and spirited, Taylor Greer grew up poor in rural Kentucky with the goals of avoiding pregnancy and getting away. But when she heads west with high hopes and a barely functional car, she meets the human condition head-on. By the time Taylor arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has acquired a completely unexpected child, a three-year-old American Indian girl named Turtle, and must somehow come to terms with both motherhood and the necessity for putting down roots. Hers is a story about love and friendship, abandonment and belonging, and the discovery of surprising resources in apparently empty places.
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
ISBN: 978-0060786502
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
ISBN: 978-0060839871 (quasi non-fiction)
Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America’s Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.
Bartleby The Scrivener by Herman Melville
ISBN: 9781625580122
Experience Herman Melville’s classic novella, Bartleby the Scrivener, in this newly designed, easy-to-read edition. The story follows a Wall Street lawyer who hires a clerk, Bartleby, who initially works hard only to later refuse any tasks given to him, with the simple phrase, “I would prefer not to.” While on the surface it may appear to be a story of one man’s rebellion against his mundane job, Bartleby delves into deeper themes such as the alienation and depression of American labor and life.
Grade 11
This year, Archimedean Upper Conservatory’s summer assignments will be focused on the theme of individual choice. Demonstrating individual choice may include the following:
- You are not afraid to experiment.
- You believe that destiny is not a real thing.
- You do not let others dictate how to live your life.
- You are unique.
- You are self-reliant.
- You believe in your own rights and freedom.
- You make choices to get through difficult situations
For your summer assignment, you will have Two required books of your choice from the provided list.
Book 1 (Choose 1 of 3)
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
ISBN: 9780812985405
February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.
From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damien Duffy
ISBN: 978-1419731334
This graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s 1993 classic depicts her dystopian vision of a future America riven into chaos by class conflict, designer drugs, and race wars. This prescient work of science fiction explores the many ways our carefully constructed world can fall apart, while also showing a clear perspective on how to find your own light and meaning in the midst of darkness and chaos.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
ISBN: 978-1512090567
Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and will not reveal her lover’s identity. The scarlet letter A (for adultery) she has to wear on her clothes, along with her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. She struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity as Hawthorne explores the warping power of shame and the oppressive nature of a society where individual morality becomes the subjective of relentless collective scrutiny.
Book 2 (Choose 1 of 3)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
ISBN: 978-1595586438
Legal scholar Michelle Alexander investigates the US incarceration system in the wake of the War on Drugs in this book that challenged national assumptions about racial progress after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as “brave and bold,” and described as “profoundly necessary” by the Miami Herald, this text provides an incisive and illuminating view into the contemporary American justice system.
The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert
ISBN: 978-0805092998
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field to argue that we are in the early stages of a sixth mass extinction event, one that is the direct result of human choices. In this text, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and prompts us to consider what it means if this sixth extinction is, as Kolbert argues, likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
ISBN: 978-0307742483
A 2017 National Book Award Finalist, Killers of the Flower Moon delves into an under-reported chapter in American history. This book compiles a variety of sources to unravel exactly what caused a series of mysterious deaths and grizzly murders that swept through the Osage Indian Nation–at the time the richest nationality per-capita due to oil reserves located on their tribal land. This book offers a compelling study the dark side of human nature, the pursuit of justice, and the complicated web of wealth, power, and prejudice that determines which lives are deemed worth saving
Grade 12
This year, Archimedean Upper Conservatory’s summer assignments will be focused on the theme of individual choice. Demonstrating individual choice may include the following:
- You are not afraid to experiment.
- You believe that destiny is not a real thing.
- You do not let others dictate how to live your life.
- You are unique.
- You are self-reliant.
- You believe in your own rights and freedom.
- You make choices to get through difficult situations
For your summer assignment, you will have one required novel, AND a second book of your choice from the provided list.
Book 1 (Mandatory Reading)
How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster
ISBN: 978-0062301673
While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes—of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.
What does it mean when a literary hero is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he’s drenched in a sudden rain shower?
Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower-and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.
Book 2 (Choose 1 of 4)
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
ISBN: 978-0385333481
Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding ‘fathers’ of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he’s the inventor of ‘ice-nine’, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker’s three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker’s Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh.
Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut’s cult tale of global destruction preys on our deepest fears of witnessing Armageddon and, worse still, surviving it …
Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
ISBN: 978-0307278449
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
Remains of the Day by Kazuro Ishiguro
ISBN: 978-0679731726
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. A simple story on its face, Remains of the Day is one of the sharpest (and surprisingly humorous) examinations of the cost of missed opportunities and man’s capacity for self-deception of the modern era.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
ISBN: 978-0486415871
Few authors have been as personally familiar with desperation as Fyodor Dostoevsky, and none have been so adept at describing it. Crime and Punishment—the novel that heralded the author’s period of masterworks—tells the story of the poor and talented student Raskolnikov, a character of unparalleled psychological depth and complexity. Raskolnikov reasons that men like himself, by virtue of their intellectual superiority, can and must transcend societal law. To test his theory, he devises the perfect crime—the murder of a spiteful pawnbroker living in St. Petersburg.
In one of the most gripping crime stories of all time, Raskolnikov soon realizes the folly of his abstractions. Haunted by vivid hallucinations and the torments of his conscience, he seeks relief from his terror and moral isolation—first from Sonia, the pious streetwalker who urges him to confess, then in a tense game of cat and mouse with Porfiry, the brilliant magistrate assigned to the murder investigation. A tour de force of suspense, Crime and Punishment delineates the theories and motivations that underlie a bankrupt morality.