All Hawthorne High School students and upcoming students have to read an assigned book and complete a given project over the summer. I think this is a good idea to have summer reading because it brings the reading skills up in students. Most students just want to hang out with friends and go away for the summer, but with the summer reading the students if they have nothing to do all day they could read and let time fly. If the students do the reading during the early parts of the summer, they will have it done in no time and have the rest of the summer to themselves. If the students do not read the recomended book over the summer, they will not understand the level of difficulty and style of books they will be reading that year in high school.

There are different books for the different grades. Upcoming seniors will read The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak; Juniors will read Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys; sophomores will read Sunrise Over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers; and freshman will read The Beast by Walter Dean Myers. The Honor English classes are assigned a different book: English I Honors, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; English II Honors, Lord of the Flies by William Golding; English III Honors, Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin; and English IV Honors, Herman Hesse’s novel Siddhartha.