Dear Upper School Students,

We hope you will enjoy a summer filled with reading, and we encourage those of you already on campus to stop by the Upper School Library before your departure and pick up a few texts to peruse this summer. In addition to your leisure reading, all students will be required to read a book or two to keep their analytical skills in fighting trim and to prepare for English class in the fall. All Upper School students will read Billy Collins’ Sailing Alone Around the Room, in anticipation of the author’s visit to campus as the 2010 Karl Jonske Memorial Lecturer. In addition, freshmen, sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors will each read another book keyed to their fall courses. All of these books are now available in the Catlin Gabel bookstore, as well as at bookstores in the region. To make sure that everyone is on the same page in fall discussions of these works, your instructors request that you purchase the following editions of these texts:

All Upper School Students
Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Random House, 2002 (ISBN-13: 978-
0375755194)

English 9
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, Penguin, 2002 (ISBN-13: 978-0142000670)

English 10
Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, Penguin, 1977 (ISBN-13: 978-0140014457)

English 11
Toni Morrison, A Mercy, Vintage, 2009 (ISBN-13: 978-0307276766)

Senior Electives

Classical and Contemporary Rhetoric
David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Back Bay, 1998 (ISBN-13:
978-0316925280)

Infernos
R. W. B. Lewis, Dante: A Life, Penguin, 2000 (ISBN-13: 978-0143116417)

Modern and Contemporary Drama
Anton Chekhov, Chekhov: The Essential Plays, trans. Michael Heim, Modern Library,
2003 (ISBN-13: 978-0375761348)

Modern Queer Literature: From Whitman to Winterson
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Vintage, 1994 (ISBN-13: 978-0679744474)

Modernity and Modernism
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Fred Kaplan and Sylvere Mondod, Third
Norton Critical Edition, 2000 (ISBN-13: 978-0393975604)

Please complete this required reading before the first day of classes in anticipation of discussion and quizzes. Enjoy a healthy, restful summer.

—The Members of the English Department