Reading List Overview

Some of these may vary from year to year, based on tutors’ discretion or preference. However, this list should ultimately reflect our primary commitment to broad exposure to the Great Books, particularly in the high school years. 

7th Grade (KY History)

  • Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (Summer reading)
  • White Squaw, Arville Wheeler
  • Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come
  • Song of the River, Billy C. Clark
  • Bruchko, Olson

8th Grade (American History)

  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Summer reading)
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  • The Old Man and the Sea, Earnest Hemingway
  • Johnny Tremain, Esther Forbes
  • With Lee in Virginia, G. A. Henty
  • The Chosen, Chaim Potok
  • Through Gates of Splendor, Elisabeth Elliott

9th Grade (Western Civ. I)

  • The Iliad, Homer (Summer reading)
  • The Odyssey, Homer
  • Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
  • Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare
  • The Aeneid, Virgil

10th Grade (Western Civ. II)

  • The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Summer reading)
  • The City of God, Augustine (selections)
  • Beowulf
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  • The Canterbury Tales (selections), Geoffrey Chaucer
  • The Rule of St. Benedict (selections)
  • Hamlet, William Shakespeare
  • Paradise Lost, John Milton
  • Selected poems of Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manly Hopkins

11th Grade (American History/Rhetoric/Gov.& Econ.)

  • Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Summer reading)
  • Of Plymouth Plantation (selections), William Bradford
  • Selected Poems, Anne Bradstreet
  • “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards
  • “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” Edgar Allen Poe
  • The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville
  • Selected Poems, Emily Dickinson
  • Selected Poems, Walt Whitman
  • “The Real Thing,” Henry James
  • “The Bride Come to Yellow Sky,” Stephen Crane
  • “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • Selected Poems, Robert Frost
  • Selected Poems, T. S. Eliot
  • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  • Selected Poems, W. H. Auden
  • Selected Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor
  • Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics
  • How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler
  • The Republic, Plato
  • The Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers

12th Grade (Senior Seminar/Worldview)

  • The Brothers Karamazov, Fyoder Dostoyevsky (Summer reading)
  • The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy
  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solshenitzen
  • A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
  • 1984 or Animal Farm, George Orwell
  • Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  • Selected Poems by British Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats)
  • C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity, Space Trilogy, The Great Divorce)