Summer Reading

1. Students entering 10th grade Summer Reading

2. Yet they find sympathy and kindness for strangers and love for each other, because in Vietnam they are the only family they have. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross' platoon of soldiers are a group of very young men, most of whom are unprepared for the Vietnam War. • They carry heavy rations and supplies, and pictures of their girlfriends, and fear and sadness and confusion. • They miss their families, their girlfriends and buddies; they miss the lives they left back home.

3. On the hot Texas army base she calls home, Katie spends the lazy days of her summer waiting: waiting to grow up; waiting for Dickie Mack to fall in love with her; waiting for the beatings to stop. • Since their mother died, Katie and her older sister, Diane, have struggled to understand their often violent father. • While Diane escapes into the arms of her boyfriend, Katie hides in her room or escapes to her best friend's house--until Katie's admiration for her strong-willed sister leads her on an adventure that transforms her life.

4. Four months later, he turned up dead. After graduating from Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness. • His diary, letters and two notes found at a remote campsite tell of his desperate effort to survive, apparently stranded by an injury and slowly starving.

5. Lily's companion is Rosaleen, the black woman hired to care for her. After the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Rosaleen gets beaten for defending her new right to vote. • While racial tensions simmer around them, the women help Lily accept her loss and learn the power of forgiveness. Lily Owens, 14, is an emotionally abused white girl living with her uncaring father on a peach farm in South Carolina. The memory of her mother, who was accidentally killed in Lily's presence when she was four, haunts her constantly. • Rosaleen and Lily flee to Tiburon, a town Lily believes her mother had a connection to. A clue among her mother's possessions leads Lily to the Boatwright sisters, 3black women who keep bees.

6. “Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

7. This entertaining novel is filled with scientists, G-men, and ordinary folks chasing each other around in search of the world’s most important and dangerous new substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature. Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding 'fathers' of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is 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.

8. Book Fair • We will be going on Friday • Please bring $ or a check made out to Tohickon Middle School