ARHS Recommended Reading Lists: Honors LA 9 Recommended Reading List

Louisa May Alcott's classic novel about the relationship of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies during the mid-nineteenth century in New England.

Rev. and updated bibliography. Vivacious Elizabeth Bennet is fascinated and repelled by the arrogant Mr. Darcy. Their spirited courtship is conducted against a background of assembly-ball flirtations and drawingroom intrigues.

Chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists.

When a penniless governess falls in love with the brooding master of Thornfield, she is unaware of the tragic events that will follow.

A story of a Chinese peasant and his passionate, dogged accumulation of land and more land, while weathering famine and drought and revolution.

In the Slav-oriented state of the future, the Lower Orders are in ascendence and happy hooligans roam the London streets, bashing senior citizens in the eyes with bicycle chains.

After being shipwrecked on a deserted island, Robinson Crusoe endures a lonely struggle for survival.

a bildungsroman that depicts the personal growth and personal development of an orphan nicknamed Pip.

After being betrayed by his own people and by white men, a Ute Indian boy tries to regain his pride in himself and his heritage.

A New York lawyer remembers his boyhood in Nebraska and his friendship with a pioneer Bohemian girl.

Considered the best mystery novel ever written by many readers, And Then There Were None is the story of 10 strangers, each lured to Indian Island by a mysterious host. Once his guests have arrived, the host accuses each person of murder. Unable to leave the island, the guests begin to share their darkest secrets--until they begin to die.

While en route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, the Orient Express is stopped dead in its tracks by a snowdrift. Passengers awake to find the train still stranded and to discover that a wealthy American has been brutally stabbed to death in his private compartment. Incredibly, that compartment is locked from the inside. With no escape into the wintery landscape the killer must still be on board. Fortunately, the brilliant Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot is also on board, having booked the last available berth.

Adam Cooper signs up on the muster roll of the Lexington Militia on April 19th, 1775, and then lives through the first day of conflict with the British, during which his father is killed.

After injuring his hand, a silversmith's apprentice in Boston becomes a messenger for the Sons of Liberty in the days before the American Revolution.

A 110-year-old black woman reminisces about her life, which has stretched from the days of slavery to the black militancy and civil rights movements of the 1960s.

After a plane crash strands them on a tropical island while the rest of the world is ravaged by war, a group of British schoolboys attempts to form a civilized society but descends into brutal anarchy.

After spending eight months in a mental institution following a suicide attempt, seventeen-year-old Conrad returns home and finds that he must rebuild his life.

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official.

A novel set against the three decades of Afghanistan's history shaped by Soviet occupation, civil war, and the Taliban, which tells the stories of two women, Mariam and Laila, who grow close despite their nineteen-year age difference and initial rivalry as they suffer at the hand of a common enemy: their abusive husband.

In nineteenth-century France a reformed ex-convict, Jean Baljean, finds himself threatened by events and people from his past.

Married to a man she did not love, Janie was not yet forty when Joe died. Then she found true happiness.

Contains two famous stories: The first of Ichabod Crane and his encounter with the headless horseman, and the second about Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep and awakened twenty years later.

McMurphy, a criminal who feigns insanity, is admitted to a mental hospital where he challenges the autocratic authority of the head nurse.

After being mentally retarded for all of his thirty-two years, Charlie Gordon undergoes an operation designed to change his life.

Fourteen-year-old Lily and her companion, Rosaleen, an African-American woman who has cared for Lily since her mother's death ten years earlier, flee their home after Rosaleen is victimized by racist police officers, and find a safe haven in Tiburon, South Carolina at the home of three beekeeping sisters, May, June, and August.

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New Hampshire boarding school.

Pi Patel, having spent an idyllic childhood in Pondicherry, India, as the son of a zookeeper, sets off with his family at the age of sixteen to start anew in Canada, but his life takes a marvelous turn when their ship sinks in the Pacific, leaving him adrift on a raft with a 450-pound Bengal tiger for company.

aptain Ahab's determination to find and kill the great white whale becomes an obsession driving him to disaster.

After the Civil War sweeps away the genteel life to which she has been accustomed, Scarlett O'Hara sets about to salvage her Georgia plantation home.

A circus known as Le Cirque des Rêves features two illusionists, Celia and Marco, who are unknowingly competing in a game to which they have been irrevocably bound by their mercurial masters, and as the two fall deeply and passionately in love with each other, their masters intervene with dangerous consequences.

Clare and Henry, deeply in love, try desperately to maintain normal lives even though he has been diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition in which his genetic clock periodically resets, pulling him through time to the past or future.

A group of international guests, taken hostage by terrorists while attending a birthday party at the home of the vice president of a small South American country, form bonds with their captors and enter into an almost idyllic lifestyle, united by the music of Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano.

Thirteen-year-old Anna, conceived specifically to provide blood and bone marrow for her sister Kate who was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia at the age of two, decides to sue her parents for control of her body when her mother wants her to donate a kidney to Kate.

Emma Hunt's son Jacob, who has Asperger's syndrome and occasionally tries helping the police with his unique forensic analysis abilities, falls under suspicion when a murder occurs in town, reminding Emma of society's--and the legal system's--misunderstanding with regard to the behavioral cues associated with Asperger's.

An adolescent boy, knowing he is about to be dropped by his school, spends three days and nights in New York City.

Friends Snow Flower and Lily find solace in their bond as they face isolation, arranged marriages, loss, and motherhood in nineteenth-century China.

Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of generating life from lifeless matter and creates a monster who, scorned for being ugly, swears revenge on his creator and the human race.

Young Francie Nolan experiences the problems of growing up in a Brooklyn, New York slum.

On the night before his death, philosophical canine Enzo recalls various moments from his life and examines his contributions to the preservation of his master's family.

While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her son find a treasure map that leads to a pirate fortune as well as great danger.

Skeeter returns home to Mississippi from college in 1962 and begins to write stories about the African-American women that are found working in white households, which includes Aibileen, who grieves for the loss of her son while caring for her seventeenth white child, and Minny, Aibileen's sassy friend, the hired cook for a secretive woman who is new to town.

An Englishman's voyages carry him to Lilliput, a land of people six inches high, and to Brobdingang, a land of giants.

An African-American family in Depression era Mississippi battles the odds to hold onto their property and their self-respect.

The discovery of the One Ring ignites the great war between good and evil in Middle-earth, as a courageous group of adventurers embarks on a perilous quest to destroy the dangerous artifact.

The dark forces of Mordor spread throughout Middle-earth and the fellowship forged to destroy the One Ring of power is broken, leaving Frodo the hobbit and Sarnwise Gamgee alone to return the ring to Mount Doom.

The War of the Rings comes to a close as Frodo and Sam continue to move closer to Mount Doom in an attempt to destroy the One Ring of Power and end Sauron's evil reign forever.

A color-illustrated edition of J. R. R. Tolkien's novel about Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit who lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to share in an adventure from which he may never return.

The escapades of Tom Sawyer and his friends in a small, nineteenth-century town on the Mississippi River.

Huck, in flight from his murderous father, and Jim, in flight from slavery, pilot their raft down the Mississippi River in search of freedom.

An American frigate tracks down a ship-sinking submarine commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo.

A wealthy young Jew and his family, experiencing changing fortunes under Roman tyranny, are affected by the life and teachings of a Nazarene named Jesus Christ.

A compilation of seven of the author's science fiction works. Includes the Invisible Man and War of the Worlds.

A play in three acts portraying life in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire, in the early 1900's through the routine daily events and the major moments in the lives of George Gibbs, Emily Webb, and their families; and how their lives, although mundane, are touched by the universal forces of love, despair, apathy, nature, and death.