FOREIGN LANGUAGE

AP Spanish, REQUIRED:

• La Casa Embrujada, Arturo de Rosa — Señor Pepino (a would-be Sherlock Holmes) and his sidekick Panzón solve the mystery of a haunted house in Acapulco.

RECOMMENDED READING FOR EXTRA CREDIT:

Spanish V:

• Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende — Eliza Sommers, left alone and pregnant in Chile when her lover Joaquin runs off to California during the Gold Rush, decides to follow him only to become entranced with her new life of freedom and independence.
• Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, edited by Delia Poey and Virgil Suarez — An anthology of contemporary Latino fiction, featuring the work of 29 writers who live in the United States and write in English.
• Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende — Aurora del Valle, raised in the privileged class of Chile by her grandmother, is tormented by nightmares and half-memories of events set in San Francisco's Chinatown. Disillusioned in her marriage, Aurora sets out to rediscover the missing years of her early childhood.
• El Alquimista, Paulo Coelho — La mÁgica historia de Paulo Coelho, que trata sobre Santiago, un niÑo pastor andaluz que viaja en busca de un tesoro material, nos enseÑa la importancia que tiene el saber eschuchar lo que nos dice el corazÓn, a aprender a leer los presagios dispersados por el camino de nuestras vidas y, sobre todo, a seguir nuestros sueÑos.
• El Tunel, Ernesto Sabato — Juan Pablo Castel, tortured by self-doubt, is driven to desperate and tragic lengths in his desire to totally possess Mara Iribarne, a woman he believes is the only person who truly understands him and his work.
• Sisters/Hermanas (bilingual version), Gary Paulsen — Told in both English and Spanish by a Newbery Honor winner, "Sisters / Hermanas" reveals the similarities of young women trapped in lives in which beauty and youth are priceless commodities--whether on the street or in a high school classroom.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez — The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility — the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth — these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master
• News of a Kidnapping, Gabriel García Márquez — Consumed these past twenty years by a "biblical holocaust," Colombia has endured leftist insurgencies, right-wing death squads, currency collapses, cholera epidemics, and, most recently and corrosively, drug trafficking. Returning to his days as a reporter for El Espectador, Gabriel García Márquez chronicles, with consummate skill, the period in late 1990 when Colombian security forces mounted a nationwide manhunt for Pablo Escobar, the ruthless and elusive head of the Medellín cartel. Ten men and women were abducted by Escobar's henchmen and used as bargaining chips against extradition to the United States. From the testimonies and diaries of the survivors, García Márquez reconstructs their bizarre ordeal with cinematic intensity, breathtaking language, and rigor. We are drawn into a world that, like some phantasmagorical setting in a great García Márquez novel, we can scarcely believe exists — but that continually shocks us with its cold, hard reality.
• Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray — Rigoberta nació en San Miguel Uspantán, El Quiché, Guatemala. Aprendió castellano cuando tenía veinte años sin libros, maestros ni escuela. Lo aprendió con su voluntad feroz por romper el silencio en el que viven los indios de América Latina. Se apropió el lenguaje del colonizador, no para integrarse a una historia que nunca la incluyó, sino para hacer valer, mediante la palabra, una cultura que es parte de esa historia.

Spanish IV:

• Daughter of Fortune, Isabel Allende — Eliza Sommers, left alone and pregnant in Chile when her lover Joaquin runs off to California during the Gold Rush, decides to follow him only to become entranced with her new life of freedom and independence.
• Daughters of the Fifth Sun: a Collection of Latina Fiction and Poetry, Bryce Milligan, Mary Guerrero Milligan, and Angela de Hoyos, editors — A collection of short fiction and poetry that displays the breadth and achievement of celebrated Latina authors while introducing the next generation of voices.
• Iguana Dreams: New Latino Fiction, edited by Delia Poey and Virgil Suarez — An anthology of contemporary Latino fiction, featuring the work of 29 writers who live in the United States and write in English.
• Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende — Aurora del Valle, raised in the privileged class of Chile by her grandmother, is tormented by nightmares and half-memories of events set in San Francisco's Chinatown. Disillusioned in her marriage, Aurora sets out to rediscover the missing years of her early childhood.
• Paula, Isabel Allende — Written for her daughter Paula when she became ill and slipped into a coma, Paula is the colorful story of Allende's life--from her early years in her native Chile, through the turbulent military coup of 1973, to the subsequent dictatorship and her family's years of exile. In the telling, bizarre ancestors reveal themselves, delightful and bitter childhood memories surface, enthralling anecdotes of youthful years are narrated and intimate secrets are softly whispered.
• El Diario de Motocicleta, Ernesto Che Guevara — These travel diaries capture the essence and exuberance of the young legend, Che Guevara. In January 1952, Che set out from Buenos Aires to explore South America on an ancient Norton motorcycle. He encounters an extraordinary range of people -- from native Indians to copper miners, lepers and tourists -- experiencing hardships and adventures that informed much of his later life. (Spanish)
• Platero and I, Juan Ramon Jimenez — This lyric portrait of life--and the little donkey, Platero--in a remote Andalusian village is the masterpiece of Juan Ramon Jimenez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature. "An exquisite book, rich, shimmering, truly incomparable." -- New Yorker
• Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada, Pablo Neruda — Publicado por primera vez en 1924 por Pablo Neruda, (quien tenía 20 años), es quizás la obra más conocida del autor, la cual significó su consolidación literaria. El tema general de la obra es un canto a la mujer, la angustia, la ausencia, la tristeza, el recuerdo.
• Odas elementales, Pablo Neruda — It shouldn't be so dazzling to state that, after overcoming historic contingencies, Neruda's work is, undoubtedly, among the most important ones of the 20th century and not only in the Spanish language.
• El sueño de América, Esmeralda Santiago (copies available from Mrs. Phelps) — América Gonzales es empleada de un hotel en una isla en la costa de Puerto Rico, donde limpia los cuartos de extranjeros ricos que miran de reojo. Su madre alcohólica le tiene resentimiento...su novio Correa, quien es casado le pega...y su hija de catorce años piensa que su vida seria mejor en cualquier otro lugar menos donde esté America.Asi que cuando le ofrecen la oportunidad de trabajar como criada y niñera para una familia en el municipio de Weschester, Nueva York, America cree que ha encontrado una puerta de escape. Pero al mismo tiempo en que disfruta del lujo relativo de su nueva vida atreviéndose incluso a querer a otro hombre que no sea Correa, América tiene que luchar contra la constante sensación de que nunca podra escapar su pasado, no importa lo que haga.

Spanish III:

• The Stories of Eva Luna, Isabel Allende — Lying in bed with her European lover, refugee and journalist Rolf Carle, Eva answers his request for a story "you have never told anyone before" with these twenty-three samples of her vibrant artistry. Interweaving the real and the magical, she explores love, vengeance, compassion, and the strengths of women, creating a world that is at once poignantly familiar and intriguingly new. Rendered in the sumptuously imagined, uniquely magical style of one of the world's most stunning writers, The Stories of Eva Luna is the cornerstone of Allende's work. It is not to be missed by anyone -- whether a devotee of Ms. Allende's oeuvre or a new acquaintance to her work.
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez — While visiting her relatives in the Dominican Republic, Yolanda reflects: "She and her sisters have led such turbulent lives — so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them. But look at her cousins: women with households and authority in their voices. Let this turn out to be my home." Yolanda left this home in the early 1960s when, for political reasons, her parents immigrated to the United States with their four young daughters. Her parents made sure Yolanda and her sisters went to prep school to meet the "right kind" of Americans and in time, when the political climate cooled down in the Dominican Republic, the girls were allowed to return to spend summers with their extended family. Now the daughters are grown. Carla is a child psychologist who believes that being dressed like her sisters when they were young weakened their identities. Sandi is obsessed with her weight, never quite satisfied with her life. Sofia, always a rebel, has just given birth to the first male child in two generations and named him after his grandfather. Yolanda, the primary narrator of the story, contemplates a move back to the Dominican Republic; perhaps there she can shed her uncomfortable identity as the family poet. With humor, grace, and insight, How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents looks back on the lives of the four Garcia sisters and their parents, blending family history and expectations with the realities of their adopted culture.
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez — Alvarez follows her charming first novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), with a broader, deeper, and even more affecting second one. It's a true story drawn from the history of her native Dominican Republic, about the Mirabel sisters, who, along with their husbands, were instrumental in the formation of an underground resistance movement against the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. What Alvarez achieves so effortlessly and splendidly, with controlled emotion and resonant detail is a novel with a beautifully balanced sense of domestic as well as political drama. She portrays the sisters as they grow from girls into women and follows their paths from school, boys, marriage, and children to even greater life-and-death concerns. Her novel is a statement about politics and history told in very human terms and, as importantly, told not with outrage, but with self-possession.
• Voices from the Fields : Children of Migrant Farmworkers Tell Their Stories, S. Beth Atkin — Photographs, poems, and interviews with children reveal the hardships and hopes of Mexican American migrant farm workers and their families.
• Casi una mujer, Esmeralda Santiago — Un conmovedor relato del desarrollo, una sincera historia de inmigrantes. Casi una mujer es el camino triunfal de Santiago hacia la edad adulta, desde los barrios de Brooklyn hacia los teatros de Manhattan. "Un relato universal, común para miles de inmigrantes a éste país, transformado en algo especial por la sencillez y honestidad de Santiago."
• María, Isaacs, Jorge — María es una de las obras clave de la literatura hispanoamericana del siglo XIX. La novela es la historia de un amor juvenil, en el marco idílico de una región selvática que nos recuerda el paraíso. Los personajes María y Efraín son víctimas de un destino trágico, pero en la memoria del lector sobrevive una historia de amor casi sobrenatural. (You can read this online here.)

Spanish II, I:

• Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories, edited with an introduction by Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans — From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this volume transport us across geographies and through cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of the Latino experience in the United States. Growing Up Latino offers, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of classic and recent Latino writing in English, converging in sometimes shocking, often funny, and always stirring memoirs and stories. Religion, sex, love, language, and family are some of the topics explored in this compelling anthology of fiction and nonfiction. With its laughter and tears, its beauty and power, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book and an unforgettable contribution to the Latino tradition of letters. This diverse collection shatters the myth of a singular U.S.- Latino experience, proving the existence of a rich tradition whose writers, active for more than forty years, are only now being recognized by a rapidly growing audience.
• When I was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago — Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty. Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.
• The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros — Told in a series of vignettes stunning for their eloquence, The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros's greatly admired novel of a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Acclaimed by critics, beloved by children, their parents and grandparents, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, it has entered the canon of coming-of-age classics. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, The House on Mango Street tells the story of Esperanza Cordero, whose neighborhood is one of harsh realities and harsh beauty. Esperanza doesn't want to belong--not to her rundown neighborhood, and not to the low expectations the world has for her. Esperanza's story is that of a young girl coming into her power, and inventing for herself what she will become.

Latin IV:

• The Labors of Aeneas: What a Pain It Was to Found the Roman Race, Rose Williams — Retells the story of The Aeneid in a light-hearted and understandable manner with humorous insights and asides. This volume makes Books I-XII of Vergil’s Aeneid enjoyable and easy to follow and may be used in conjunction with the Latin text of Vergil’s Aeneid in high school classrooms.
• Vergil's Aeneid: Hero War Humanity, Virgil, translated by G. B. Cobbold — One of the pillars of Western literary tradition, Vergil’s Aeneid is also a terrific read: the story of a man whose city is destroyed in war, and of his journey to find his place in destiny. This epic has it all: adventures on the high seas, passion, battles, monsters, magic, meddling gods, and struggles that test the moral fiber of both men and women. The Aeneid has been deemed one of the most influential poems in world literature.

Latin III:

• Catilina's Riddle, Steven Saylor — With the consular election drawing near, Rome is fiercely divided between the conservative Cicero and the tempestuous Catilina, whose followers are rumored to be plotting a blood-thirsty siege for power if their leader fails to win office. Gordianus the Finder, retired to his Etruscan farm, is happy to be free of the intrigue and danger of the capital. But when his old friend Cicero enlists the Finder in an elaborate plot to control Catilina, Gordianus is drawn back into a familiar world. Now caught in a cloak-and-dagger political struggle for the fate of the Republic, Gordianus finds himself strangely drawn to the controversial candidate. Is Catilina really a subversive renegade, or are Cicero suspicions part of an even greater conspiracy? When a headless corpse ominously appears on his farm, Gordianus knows he must unlock the secret of Catilina's Riddle before Rome tears herself apart.
• The Venus Throw: A Mystery of Ancient Rome, Steven Saylor — On a chill January evening in 56 B.C., two strange visitors to Rome—an Egyptian ambassador and a eunuch priest—seek out Gordianus the Finder whose specialty is solving murders. But the ambassador, a philosopher named Dio, has come to ask for something Gordianus cannot give—help in staying alive. Before the night is out, he will be murdered.
  Now Gordianus begins his most dangerous case. Hired to investigate Dio's death by a beautiful woman with a scandalous reputation, he will follow a trail of political intrigue into the highest circles of power and the city's most hidden arenas of debauchery. There Gordianus will learn nothing is as it seems—not the damning evidence he uncovers, not the suspect he sends to trial, not even the real truth behind Dio's death which lies in secrets—not of state, but of the heart.

Latin II:

• The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff — A young centurion ventures among the hostile tribes beyond the Roman Wall to recover the eagle standard of the Ninth, a legion which mysteriously disappeared under his father's command.
• Augustus Caesar's world: a story of ideas and events from B.C. 44 to 14 A.D.,Genevieve Foster — This book is a slice of history measured by the lifetime of Augustus Caesar. Readers will learn the major events and figures of Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek and Roman history and also the cultures of ancient China, India and Persia. Told as a story it will delight readers young and old. Wonderful time lines, charts and illustrations enhance the text.
• Under the Eagle, Simon Scarrow — It is the year 42 AD, and Centurion Macro, battle-scarred and fearless, is in the heart of Germany with the Second Legion, the toughest in the Roman army. Cato, a new recruit and the newly appointed second-in-command to Macro, will have more to prove than most. In a bloody skirmish with local tribes, Cato gets his first chance to prove that he's more than a callow, privileged youth. As their next campaign takes them to a land of unparalleled barbarity - Britain - a special mission unfolds, thrusting Cato and Macro headlong into a conspiracy that threatens to topple the Emperor himself.

Latin I

• Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of The Iliad, Rosemary Sutcliff — Retells the story of the Trojan War, from the quarrel for the golden apple, and the flight of Helen with Paris, to the destruction of Troy.
• The Wanderings of Odysseus, Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Lee — A retelling of the adventures of Odysseus on his long voyage home from the Trojan War.

 

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