6 AP Lit Books That Won’t Bore Your Students to Tears

Weirdly enough, we never set out to teach this novel, and we certainly didn’t intend for it to become the novel we taught the longest. Our first year teaching AP, we let our classes vote on the last novel of the year, and Steph’s class selected The Road, which, to be perfectly honest, she was not thrilled about.

McCarthy’s novel tells the story of a father and son trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world divided into “good guys” (those few survivors who hold onto their humanity) and “bad guys” (who give into their every selfish, cruel impulse). McCarthy is a skilled writer whose ability to create a sense of place is unmatched: the book just feels gray. It’s covered in ash from fires that ravaged the country, and our modern world (freeways, billboards, and all) is utterly abandoned.

And yet this father and son wake up every day and keep moving, “each the other’s world entire,” refusing to give up hope. Their rich love for one another powers the novel.

Despite the challenge in teaching a book that was, at the time, brand new with no ready-made resources, it worked for our students. Whether it was the dystopian setting, the unrelenting sense of danger, or the deep love between father and son, our students not only enjoyed the book year after year but engaged in rich discussions about symbolism, language, and theme.

Once we started teaching the novel regularly, we moved it to the beginning of the year because it makes for a great first full-class novel. Students like it, and the themes and symbolism aren’t too difficult to unpack. The contrast between selfishness and altruism leaps off the page, and it’s abundantly clear that “the fire” is a significant symbol. If you begin your school year with Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, it pairs nicely with the chapters on quests, biblical allusions, weather, geography, and Christ figures.

It’s hard, as an AP Lit teacher, not to introduce either Austen or Dickens to your students. Not only are they canonical greats whose excerpts show up frequently on the AP exam and the SAT, but our students struggle with the “old language” and reading stamina their works demand. 

But they’re hard to engage students with. Austen’s novels don’t involve a lot of action and center on outdated social conventions, and it’s abundantly clear that Dickens is being paid by the word. Both authors rely heavily on irony, which, if missed, turns humorous stories into real depressing slogs, and students walk away with the exact opposite impression of the one the author intended.

We decided to try Pride and Prejudice one year (the Austen selection with the most “action”), and while we had a lot to learn, we saw potential. We realized starting the novel by sharing information about the time period and showing the first episode of the BBC miniseries to help students grasp the setting and tone was time very well spent. We provided extra support during the reading process for students who were struggling to understand it, and we reminded students this was the first enemies-to-lovers romance, the one that alllll their favorite rom-coms could trace their roots to.

When it came time to discuss the novel, we zeroed in on characterization: what are each of these very different characters like? How are the predominant marriages in the novels different from one another? What, then, might Austen be trying to say about marriage, especially at a time when marriage was more of a business transaction than a love match?

It took a lot of work, but our students followed along. Not all of them got past a superficial understanding of the story, but that superficial understanding was better than what we’d gotten with, say, Heart of Darkness, and most students were able to discuss Pride and Prejudice capably by the end. Even better, a few young Austenites fell in love, reading additional selections from Austen’s catalog for their independent reading. 

We initially tried this one at Valentine’s Day (obvi), but we ultimately settled on October: it’s early enough in the year that students are motivated to tackle something challenging, but it’s not the first thing they do, scaring them right out our doors.

Pro-Tip for new AP Literature teachers: second semester seniors very much lack the motivation to persevere through a challenging text. While we do not advocate starting the year with your most difficult text, you will be well-served to put it in your first semester. Once those college acceptances (and rejections), in addition to first semester grades, begin arriving, they start checking out.

The fifth play in Wilson’s Century Cycle tells the age-old story of the American Dream from the perspective of Troy Maxon, a Black man living in Pittsburgh during the 1950s. While once a famous baseball player in the Negro Leagues, Maxon is now a garbage collector, and his belief that he is destined for more damages his relationships with his wife and children, especially his son Cory, who, as part of a different generation, sees the world differently than his father does.

Fences is a fantastic play, and it’s very accessible to students. The plot is straightforward, and while it’s rich in symbolism, students are able to identify and discuss those symbols more easily than in many other works. The family conflict and generational differences resonated with our students, and the play works for what feels like nearly any released AP Literature prompt (minus comedy, but we think the College Board realized the error of their ways with that one).

The play also raises important questions about the American Dream that, sadly, are still relevant today. Who is the American Dream for? How has it evolved over time? Who is excluded from that dream and why? If we truly believe in the American Dream, what can we do to make it accessible to all?

We originally started our year with Fences because of its accessibility, but we’ve also taught it in November and December, when students are tired and stressed about finals, and it probably works better there if you want to introduce drama, tragedy, and the tragic hero. Arthur Miller’s “Tragedy and the Common Man” paired nicely with our textbook’s definition of the classic tragic hero, and the play pairs nicely with Death of a Salesman.

One note in the way our teaching has changed over the years: the first few years we taught this, we had students read the play aloud. Given its use of racial slurs, we would no longer do that. Instead, we would have students read or listen to the play on their own, and then watch the excellent film adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.

We felt like it was important to introduce our students to comedy and satire, especially since there have been a couple years when it has shown up on the AP exam (specifically 1988, 2000, and 2002). And while the College Board has now shifted toward stable prompt wording that doesn’t specify which literary devices students must address, its inclusion of texts with an ironic tone over the years suggests familiarity with comedy and satire is still beneficial to students. 

But we also struggled to find the right text: many of the classic satires are challenging for students to comprehend on a literal level (we’re looking at you, Candide), without even touching irony, and so much of the humor is built on wordplay that by the time we unpacked the language, students no longer found it funny. (And then there’s the Woody Allen story included in our textbook, which was engaging for students when we adopted the text in 2007, but became increasingly problematic as we moved through the late 2010s and early 2020s.)

We experienced the most success when we finally settled on The Importance of Being Earnest, and showing students the film version before engaging in discussion helped improve the quality of class discussion immensely. Students appreciated the madcap humor (oh, the muffin fight), and because it was relatively short, we could get them to dig into Wilde’s words with guided reading questions.

While in many ways Earnest is a read-alike with Pride and Prejudice, we found this helpful: students had some familiarity with the time period and expectations, which made it easier for them to grasp the humor without having to do quite as much work to understand the social conventions of the time period.

We found comedy worked well at the end of first semester. Not only is that often where we looked at tragedy, making this unit a nice contrast, but end-of-the-semester fatigue has set in, so the quick pace and emphasis on humor helps us all make it to finals.

When we first started teaching AP Lit, we steered away from Shakespeare. Kate had attended an AP training recommending this approach since students often oversimplify the complex tragedies on Q3. But over time, we started to feel like we owed it to our students to dig into Shakespeare at an AP level before college (we are big believers in the cultural toolkit, after all).

We started with Hamlet (why not go big, right?), and while it wasn’t a flop, we decided to give Macbeth a shot: it’s shorter and much more action-packed than the philosophy-heavy Hamlet. We were really happy with the results (and we think our students were, too).

The play, which details Macbeth’s moral decline from the noble Thane of Glamis to the cruel Scottish king, allowed our students to explore rich themes about the corrupting nature of power and the dangers of unchecked ambition, and the play was accessible enough that we could push them to develop more complex themes than they did for some of our other texts. The text is also ripe for close reading analysis, and, because Shakespeare primarily writes in verse, it helped us bridge from prose (first semester) to poetry (second semester).

We ultimately settled on early in spring semester as the best time to tackle Macbeth: students have a semester of literary analysis under their belts, and with the start of a new semester, everyone is re-energized and motivated to improve their efforts from the previous semester. We wanted to capitalize on that momentum before college acceptance letters started rolling in and senioritis hit hard.

We started teaching Things Fall Apart when we took a break from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (it’s a beautiful piece of literature that students analyze capably, but we had too many students with their own histories of sexual abuse to feel comfortable about requiring all students to read the graphic content). Achebe’s novel tells the story of the Ibo people in Nigeria during a time of transition under white European colonists. It’s told through the lens of Okonkwo, a respected man in his tribe who struggles to accept the changes to his culture, especially when he finds himself alone in his determination to fight back against the colonists.

The novel allowed us to explore important themes about colonization and the destruction of a rich culture merely because it wasn’t European. But Achebe presents complex views of the process, lamenting what has been lost while also acknowledging some ways that life got better under the colonists, especially for the ofu, those outcast from the tribe. Because the novel is told through Okonkwo’s perspective, we also get to explore themes about the stubborn refusal to face inevitable change, themes that reminded us a lot of Fences.

Things Fall Apart worked well as our last book before the AP Exam. We liked to give students a boost of confidence by ending with a novel they felt they understood and could write meaningfully about, and by March and April, senioritis had definitely set in. Things Fall Apart is a relatively easy read, but there is a lot to discuss, and we were pleased with the insights our students came up with, often with minimal guidance.