A Sizzling Bite into AP English

       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, ...