While the College Board does not require students to read certain books, it does recommend they read literature from a variety of genres---from poetry to novels---and from different eras---from ancient Greek to the current century. "Truthfully, there is no one suggested reading list for success on the AP English lit. exam," says award-winning teacher Angi Eagleton, of the Dunham School in Baton Rouge. "I like to expose my students to a variety of cultures and time; as a result, literary art is easier to identify and define."
The College Board recommends and teachers might ask that students do an in-depth, or "close reading," of the text, in which students make notes and observations as they read. "When you close read, you observe facts and details about the text. You may focus on a particular passage, or on the text as a whole," writes Patricia Kain in an article for the Writing Center at Harvard University.
The following titles have appeared in the College Board's "101 Great Books" and on teachers' reading lists:
"Beowulf"
"The Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor
"Go Tell It on the Mountain" by James Baldwin
"Hamlet" by William Shakespeare
"The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" by Homer
"The Kite Runner" and "Thousand Splendid Suns" by Khaled Hosseini
"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
"A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens
"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston
"Til We Have Faces" by C.S. Lewis
"Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett