7 Titles That Belong on Your Introduction to AP Lit Reading List

But, where do I start???

We’ve all asked ourselves this question at some point, and it’s a question we hear ALL. THE. TIME. in AP teacher communities.

If you’ve ever taught an AP class, you likely attended a Summer Institute, where you were blasted with a firehose of information in five days and then sent home to create a detailed full-year syllabus to submit to the College Board for approval. It’s daunting and overwhelming, and so many of us have left those trainings thinking our principal has selected the wrong person to teach the class.

Because we’re English teachers, we naturally hear a lot about the AP Lit reading list. And we have plenty to say on that topic, whether you’re looking for a list of contemporary novels to assign in AP Lit, titles our students enjoyed, or even titles we moved away from teaching. 

But one specific conundrum that faces many teachers is creating an AP Lit reading list to pair with Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. We think Foster’s book is a fantastic way to start your year in AP Lit, but assigning it naturally begs the question of, well, what books should I assign with it? 

But his guide has 32 chapters (if you include the interludes woven throughout the book). Are we supposed to find 32 texts, one for each chapter? And some chapters are strangely specific: where am I going to find a novel that addresses vampires, heart disease, and baptism?

We are all about efficiency, so we set out to come up with the fewest number of texts we could assign to cover all of Foster’s concepts (we’re leaving out, for now, the interludes and general chapters, focusing instead on the specific symbols and patterns Foster unpacks). We managed to do it in seven texts, though we’re dying to hear from you if you’ve come up with an introductory AP Lit reading list that’s even more concise because the only thing better than efficiency is more efficiency.

7 Titles That Will Do the Most for Your AP Lit Reading List

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

We’ve already sung the praises of McCarthy’s postapocalyptic tale of a father and son desperate to maintain hope in a world determined to extinguish it. And we long used The Road as our introductory AP Lit novel because it engages students and it’s an accessible step into literary analysis. But it is also a goldmine when looking for a text that covers as many How to Read Literature Like a Professor chapters as possible.

Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)

The father and son are on a literal journey throughout the entire novel, walking along an abandoned road in hopes of making it to the beach, where they are convinced they will find . . . something. But as Foster points out, a quest isn’t really about the actual destination, it’s about self-knowledge, and as the boy matures over the course of the novel, he certainly gains in self-knowledge.

Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion

Eating is a big deal in The Road. Food is scarce, so one of the primary conflicts is the unending effort to find food. Every time it seems as if the father and son will run out of food, however, they happen upon a bounty, whether it’s dried up apples in an orchard, an underground bunker, or canned food with strangers around a campfire. And these meals work exactly the way Foster describes them.

. . . Or the Bible

Perhaps not surprisingly for a postapocalyptic novel, The Road is rife with biblical allusions. We’ll talk about some of them below, but the apocalyptic event is frequently spoken about as judgment, and there are significant parallels to the story of Elijah the prophet, including a reference to Malachi 4:1–6 that we always shared with students in class. Students aren’t going to get all the allusions on their own, but they certainly add resonance to the work.

It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow

Because the father and son are trying to stay alive in a world without shelter, rain and snow aren’t just inconvenient but deadly. Foster’s discussion of snow is particularly relevant, and there’s another layer added when we consider the soft layer of ash from the apocalyptic event that covers the snow.

Never Stand Next to the Hero

No spoilers from us, but yes, this one works.

. . . More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence

In this post-apocalyptic world, violence is everywhere. One of the novel’s key themes concerns the conflict between altruism and survival, and civilization has devolved into a cruel game of survival of the fittest. The “bad guys” steal from, murder, rape, and cannibalize other humans in their own efforts to stay alive, and all the violence is in service of addressing larger themes.

Is That a Symbol?

 There are plenty of symbols to analyze in McCarthy’s text, but the fire is probably the most important and easiest for students to recognize and work out.

Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too

The text is riddled with evidence that points to the boy as a Christ figure, and quite a few students are able to pick up on it with minimal pushes from us. Even better, it’s like a room of mind-blown lightbulbs going off when we start unpacking it. Those moments of epiphany are what we dream of as teachers. The use of the Christ figure is also significant to the novel’s themes, which makes for meaningful discussions about how to interpret the novel’s ambiguous ending.

If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism

There’s a pretty clear scene where the father washes his son’s hair, calling it “anointing fit for a god.” It’s probably not all that significant in and of itself, but it ties in nicely with the other religious imagery and symbolism.

Geography Matters . . .

As the father and son navigate the barren landscape, their overriding goal is to make it to the coast. They don’t know what they’ll find there, but it gives them a purpose and motivates them to get up and move each day. What they find when they get there also allows you to discuss Foster’s chapter on irony (“Is He Serious? And Other Ironies”).

It’s Never Just Heart Disease . . . And Rarely Just Illness

From the first pages of the novel, we know the father is sick with some kind of lung disease, which only worsens over the course of the novel. The illness plays a significant role and creates all sorts of interesting internal conflicts for the man; the resolution, again, ties to the theme and offers clues about how to interpret the ending.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot

Where on earth, we wondered, were we going to find an accessible text for students that covered allusions from Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the Bible (“When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare . . .,” “. . . Or the Bible,” “It’s Greek to Me”)? We thought it was an impossible task until we recalled Eliot’s poem about the cowardly Prufrock who compares himself to all manner of Greek, biblical, and Shakespearean characters before deciding he would be better off as a side character with only a passing importance to the story.

Because the text is so rich in references to other works of literature, it would also pair nicely with Foster’s chapter on intertextuality (“Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?”). And because Prufrock compares himself so unfavorably to all these heroes, it would also allow you to discuss the chapter on irony (“Is He Serious? And Other Ironies”).

“How I Met My Husband” by Alice Munro

It doesn’t hurt that we already love Munro’s story: it’s an excellent way to discuss plot and character, and never fails to generate interesting conversations. The two predominant chapters that motivated us to include the short story on this introductory AP Lit reading list are “Flights of Fancy” and “. . . So Does Season.”

The handsome young man who flirts with and then abandons Edie happens to be a pilot, fitting Foster’s “flight is freedom” message quite nicely; Edie’s epiphany that the pilot is not, actually, going to write to her happens with the change of season, helpfully reinforcing Foster’s point.

We also included this one because it would allow you to talk about the vampire chapter (“Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires”), though we acknowledge it’s a bit of a stretch.

Foster suggests a vampire is an older man who steals the life force of a younger woman, and we struggled to find a clear text that addresses this concept (aside from obvious choices like Dracula or Daisy Miller, which Foster discusses in detail). We also don’t really think Edie views Chris as a “vampire,” but since it was an interesting point of discussion with our students every year, we thought it worth mentioning here. Yes, Chris does take advantage of a younger girl, but the narrator doesn’t view him negatively, so we’re forced to read him with a bit of a softer light than we might otherwise.

“Once Upon a Time” by Nadine Gordimer

When we were creating our How to Read Literature Like a Professor unit, the chapter on fairy tales (“Hanseldee and Greteldum”) was one of the most challenging to find serious examples for. Could we find popular culture references to fairy tales? Yes. YA titles connected to fairy tales? Absolutely. But it was a struggle to find “AP” examples. We do love teaching “Hazel Tells LaVerne,” by Katharyn Howd Machan, but since we’re trying to get the most bang for our buck here, we needed a story that addresses at least one more chapter.

But then we remembered Nadine Gordimer’s short story, which we taught a few times. The unnamed narrator, who lives in South Africa, tells herself a “bedtime story” to comfort herself from the fear she feels after hearing a creaking in her home during the night. The bedtime story, full of fairy tale tropes, is rife with irony, as the mother and father, consumed with fear of the intruders and violence in their South African neighborhood, trap themselves further and further into a dangerous prison that ends up having devastating consequences for their family.

Because of its setting in South Africa, the story offers commentary that also makes this story a good choice for Foster’s chapter, “It’s All Political.” And sadly, the situation and its depiction of the tragic consequences of fear feel familiar in America as well.

“Cathedral” by Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” feels like a bit of a cheat since Foster uses it as an example in his chapter on communion. But we think it’s a worthwhile inclusion, not just because it’s a great story for discussing characterization and symbolism, but because it works with several of Foster’s chapters. 

In Carver’s story, where our prejudiced narrator is forced to spend an evening with a blind man in his home before coming to realize that, perhaps, his prejudices are unfounded, we have ample opportunities to, yes, look at communion, but also to look at symbolism in general.

The use of the cathedral throughout the story (and particularly at the end, as the blind man and the narrator draw together) gives our students a great opportunity to analyze a fairly obvious symbol (“Is That a Symbol?”). And the story also allows you to discuss Foster’s chapter on blindness (“He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know”). As is often the case, the blind character is far more insightful than the sighted characters; the narrator undergoes his own spiritual epiphany over the course of the work.

We struggled to find a short story or poem that would allow you to discuss Foster’s chapter “Marked for Greatness,” but it could be folded in with your discussion of the blind man: his difference certainly marks him out in a way that is significant to the story, and Foster’s chapter on blindness is really a more narrow application of the broader chapter on “marked” characters. (Plus, pop culture is rife with examples of “marked” characters, so we’re pretty sure your students are okay with this chapter anyway.)

“The Flea” by John Donne and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

Not all teachers will feel comfortable directly addressing Foster’s two chapters on sex, but if you are, Donne and Marvell have you covered. Not only are these engaging poems that will help your students see that poetry doesn’t have to be boring, but they allow you to highlight Foster’s points in these two chapters, especially when considered together.

In “The Flea,” the speaker uses a flea bite as a metaphor for sex: it’s a bit more directly tied to sex than some of Foster’s examples of encoded sex, but the poem’s purpose is, ultimately, an exercise in creativity as the speaker tries to convince his sweetheart to have sex with him; there’s not much more to it. The poem is clever and allows students to see how poets can use figurative language to represent sex.

In contrast, Marvell’s poem is blatantly about sex, but that’s not really the point of the poem (and reading it that way certainly limits its power). Ultimately, it’s a carpe diem poem, urging us to make the most of our lives since time is nipping at our heels, and it’s a great example of sex being used to represent something else in a way that doesn’t require a lengthy reading experience.

If you’re teaching Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor or considering adding it to your AP Lit course, we hope this introductory AP Lit reading list gives you some ideas to help your students put Foster’s work into practice. And we’re dying to hear what texts you’re using: do you have an even more efficient list than we have here? Do you have a better example of “Marked for Greatness”? Email us at hello@threeheads.works or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works to let us know.

And if you’re looking for a ready-made unit to help your students understand Foster’s key ideas, we’ve got you covered. We took a practical approach to the text, using it as a supplement rather than the focus of our instruction, so our unit includes a study guide (with multiple options for grouping, based on what works best in your class), quizzes (or a final exam, depending on how you assign the text), and an escape room activity to help students review what they’ve learned. Head to our TPT store to add it to your collection!