Dear (soon-to-be) 10th grade student,
The week we return to class, we will be using our summer independent reads for one of our first in-class essays, so come back prepared with your annotation completed.
As the bingo card indicates, the books you select for the Annotated Bibliography must be written by American authors. The idea here is that you’ll be reading with an intentional variety while still giving you plenty of room to choose something that interests you.
PART 1: READ (at least) THREE books over the summer, completing all three before school starts. While we want you to select your own American texts that interest you, we ask that you use this chart to instill a bit of variety in your choices. Note: We ask that you annotate books that aren’t part of our syllabus, thus you may not choose The Great Gatsby.
PART 2: Write an annotated biography to turn in.
The Annotated Bibliography has two parts for each of your three books-
Accurate MLA Entry for each book (ALPHABETIZE entries by author last name):
Last Name, First Name. Title of Book. City of Publication, Publisher, Publication Date.
Write one paragraph describing your experience reading the book:
Each citation is followed by a brief descriptive paragraph, which should include the student's evaluation of the text rather than a summary of it. Explain which of the characteristics on the Bingo card the book aligns with (even though there may be multiple, pick just one). Rate the book 1-5 (5 being best), say why you ranked it this way, and identify the difficulty of the text (easy, just right, hard, et cetera).
Example Entry:
Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land. New York, Scribner, 2020.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is an ambitious epic novel spanning 1453 A.D. to the future (2100 or so). Although it follows five different main characters, the protagonist actually seems to be a book. It’s really about the unlikelihood of any old text surviving. Diogenes apparently wrote a comedy titled Cloud Cuckoo Land, which we know existed but it has since been destroyed. This is a story imagining how a book like that might have survived. Although we do not have the original text, the book makes me wonder what all went into the survival of Homer’s writings, Shakespeare’s writings, writings we find in the Bible and the Koran. In my bingo card, I categorize this book under “book that references a text written before 1800,” not only for the references to the long lost Cloud Cuckoo Land, but also because it quotes sections from The Odyssey at length. And it didn’t just reference it, but it made me curious about the Odyssey. I give this book a solid 5/5 because it manages to weave together plot lines in a surprising and satisfying way, and also because even though it looks long, it goes really fast. I give this the difficulty of “just right,” because even though I came across words I didn’t know and had to force myself to focus, I could also read it at the beach.
Turn in an alphabetized list of the books you read over the summer. This list should include a minimum of 3 books, be alphabetized by the author, but not numbered. Notice that the annotation for the book is a reverse indent.
Here are some helpful lists to consult as you make your selections (you may use books not on the list as well, so long as they are written by an American author):
Pintz award winners and finalists
National Book Young Readers award winners and longlist/ shortlist
YALSA Non-Fiction award
80 YA Books set around the world (remember to confirm that your authors are American!)
