A Sizzling Bite into AP English

             The new year of 2017 came by like a thief at night, swiftly and unexpectedly. With a new year, we make new goals and resolutions that we yearn to accomplice, and as for me, I have new reading goals! The first semester of the AP English class I am currently taking has been strenuous. I entered the classroom with unsatisfactory skills in reading and writing but I am improving in a gradual process. So far, we have read two stunning literary merit books by the name of Native Son and The Mayor of Casterbridge by the authors of Richard Wright and Thomas Hardy respectively. These books are awesome and I became conscious of how many great books I missed out on. I must continue to read, as I felt a need to quench my goals of reading and writing for the brand new year. This year, my solemn focus is being able to capture challenging vocabulary words through reading that I may be able to write at a level that is colleg...

            Our second AP English reading book is a very interesting novel that makes one think outside of the box, literally. It is definitely a work of Literary Merit and despite the novel not being filled with enormous diction words and complicated text, it is an easy read that any student in high school can manage academically or even for fun and relaxation. Richard Wright infuses issues that his fictional society faces that have existed throughout time and is even relevant today. The Protagonist of Native Son , Bigger, has a fear of many things, including: his family, friends, society, and himself, that makes him pretend and disregard his own identity.            The people from the novel’s society and societies throughout the years including today are blind, and sadly, they are not alert or aware. Society has a way of molding each individual into it’s own likeness. We are told what to do, what to wear, how to dress and...

       When I think about the word literary merit and its relation to books, I immediately picture books intellectual scholars from Harvard or Yale read with their reading glasses cords on both sides of their face. These books aren't books like the Green Eggs and Ham that are filled with rhymes and alliteration we read in kindergarten. Nor are they like Charlotte’s Web we read in middle school or all of the Harry Potter book series we read over and over again. I once believed that literary merit books are extremely complex and challenges even the best of a student who performs well academically. These books all mimic the writing style of Shakespeare and the words are lifeless in the mind of a high school student. And now, as high school students, we are forced to read these heavy duty book materials that are not very interesting to read. However, after reading about College Board’s definition of literary merit books, I realized that my definition was wrong after ...

As junior year ends, we are persuaded into believing that our three years in high school molded us into exceptional readers and that all of our writings are on point . However, that’s not the case for senior year as we are forced to put behind our custom thinking process in order to occupy new and improved college level skills. I seriously need to read more books. One of our very first assignments as a class was to go through Norma Wilkerson’s list of book titles from all of the AP English open response questions from the year 1971 to the present. After going through the list, I encountered only three book titles I knew well, and mind you, two out of the three, Song of Solomon and Crime and Punishment , were books that were assigned for the summer reading. The third book, Lord of the Flies , was just a book I read in my freshmen year I was really drawn into. As I went through the list, I also came across book titles I read years ago. I don’t remember the characters’ names, ...