Grade Nine English Summer Reading List

Welcome to our English Department’s Summer Reading Lists for Grade 9! As a means by which to improve reading comprehension, the English department requires all Grade 9 students to read at least ONE book listed under the name of the class they have chosen for the 2008-09 school year. At the start of the school year, all students will be tested by their English teacher on their selection. Books listed may be borrowed from the state library system or purchased on-line or from local bookstores.

Please note that starred (*) books indicate a parental advisory due to occasional profanity, explicit language, and/or drug-use or sexual references.

Reading Lists may also be viewed on-line at the English Department website: http://kapalama.ksbe.edu/high/english/index.htm

Ancient O‘ahu Stories from Fornander and Thrum. Dennis Kawaharada, ed. As its introduction explains, “These are stories of O‘ahu before high-rises, freeways and hotels; before sugar plantations and pineapple fields; before churches and Bibles. The stories present an ancient history of the island, telling of ancestors who created a society that valued and nurtured all forms of life; and that bonded closely with the ‘äina, or life-giving land.”

Boy: Tales of Childhood by Ronald Dahl. This coming-of-age story presents humorous anecdotes from the author’s own childhood which includes summer vacations in Norway and school days at a British boarding school.

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen. Hannah doesn’t want to attend the family Passover dinner, where her aging relatives tell the same old stories about the Holocaust. She has to go, though. During the dinner, she gets up from the table to answer the door, only to be swept back in time more than fifty years to a Polish village in 1942. Then something terrible happens. Nazi soldiers come to take her and the other villagers away to a concentration camp.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.* Maya Angelou recounts her childhood years (age three to sixteen) in America’s rural South. Angelou’s autobiography (a National Book Award winner) is an amazingly vibrant word-mosaic of events and emotions that will both tickle and terrify the reader.

Siddartha by Herman Hesse. A youth from India meets the Buddha but cannot be content with a disciple’s role. Instead, he must work out his own destiny and solve his own doubt. It is a twisting and difficult road that Siddartha must follow in an attempt to find the ultimate answer to man’s role on earth.

Hawaiian Fishing Traditions by Moke Manu & Others. Dennis Kawaharada ed. “Hawaiian Fishing Traditions celebrates the great fishers of ancient Hawai'i, known for attracting and propagating fish, inventing fishing techniques, and bringing in extraordinary catches. The most famous of these fishers was Ku'ula-kai, who became deified as an ÿaumakua (god) of fishing because of his power to control fish. He established fishing shrines, also called ko'a, and told fishers to offer the first fish to his father and mother as thanks-giving, to insure a good supply and to lift the kapu on the catch and free it for consumption.”

The Shimmering Ka 'Olili by Keola Beamer.* “Keola Beamer's storytelling resonates in that deepest part of you, the part that has always known that spirits walk among us, that the sea and the earth are alive. He writes of that place where modern and ancient Hawai‘i meet. This collection is a shining example of how the Hawaiian culture isn't something just to be remembered and studied, but something that is alive and growing."