It’s time to analyze the titles listed for question 3 of the 2022 AP English Lit exam! Many AP Lit teachers use this list to inform their purchases for classroom libraries, student reading suggestions, and of course, personal reading ideas! The 2022 exam included 17 titles included that had never been listed on an official open question before. Here’s a rundown of the new additions, as well as some other interesting data I found in analyzing the list.
Disclaimer: Inclusion to the AP Lit open question is not an official milestone or designation. Just because a novel has been included doesn’t mean it’s officially AP-worthy, nor does an omission mean that a book is not worthy of AP.
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New Titles to the Open Question
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1974)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Science Fiction/Dystopia
Awards: Hugo Award for Science Fiction, National Book Award
Goodreads rating: 4.22/5
Goodreads summary: Shevek, a brilliant physicist, decides to take action. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and attempt to tear down the walls of hatred that have isolated his planet of anarchists from the rest of the civilized universe. To do this dangerous task will mean giving up his family and possibly his life—Shevek must make the unprecedented journey to the utopian mother planet, Urras, to challenge the complex structures of life and living, and ignite the fires of change.
Misc. Information: The Dispossessed is the first in a seven-novel cycle called the Hainish Cycle, although it was the fifth book published in that series.
Dominicana by Angie Cruz (2019)
Genre: coming-of-age
Goodreads rating: 4.12/5
Goodreads summary: Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay.
As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family’s assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.
The Dragon Can’t Dance by Earl Lovelace (1979)
Author origin: Trinidad and Tobago
Genre: post-colonial fiction
Goodreads rating: 4.03/5
Goodreads summary: Carnival takes on social and political importance in this recognized classic. The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing “king of the Hill,” becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye’s band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade—this time, involving guns and hostages—before the illusion of power becomes reality.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Dystopian
Awards: American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Spoken Word Grammy (for audiobook)
Goodreads rating: 3.98/5
Goodreads summary: Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.
Misc. Information: Despite this novel’s firm place in the literary canon of the US, it has never been a suggested novel for the open question. Some perceive it as too “low-level” since it is a popular choice in grades 9-10. Fahrenheit’s inclusion on this list is a sign that College Board is taking steps to reward good analysis of all fiction, not just high-brow literature.
Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1827)
Author origin: USA
Genre: historical romance, feminist
Goodreads rating: 3.38/5
Goodreads summary: Set in seventeenth-century New England in the aftermath of the Pequod War, Hope Leslie not only chronicles the role of women in building the republic but also refocuses the emergent national literature on the lives, domestic mores, and values of American women.
Misc. Information: Catharine Sedgwick’s career is an interesting study, as she was a rare example of a woman making a full time living off of her writing in the early 19th century.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)
Author origin: Chilé
Genre: Magical realism
Awards: Best Novel of the Year (Chilé)
Goodreads rating: 4.26/5
Goodreads summary: In one of the most important and beloved Latin American works of the twentieth century, Isabel Allende weaves a luminous tapestry of three generations of the Trueba family, revealing both triumphs and tragedies. Here is patriarch Esteban, whose wild desires and political machinations are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara, a woman touched by an otherworldly hand. Their daughter, Blanca, whose forbidden love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates her father, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, a beautiful, ambitious girl who will lead the family and their country into a revolutionary future.
Misc. Information: The novel is set to be adapted into a television series on Hulu, starring Eva Longoria, in the near future.
The Hummingbird’s Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (2005)
Author origin: Mexico
Genre: Historical fiction
Goodreads rating: 4.2/5
Goodreads summary: It is 1889, and the civil war is brewing in Mexico. Sixteen year old Teresita, illegitimate but beloved daughter of the wealthy and powerful rancher Don Tomas Urrea, wakes from the strangest dream – a dream that she has died. Only it was not a dream. This passionate and rebellious young woman has arisen from the dead with the power to heal – but it will take all her faith to endure the trials that await her and her family now that she has become the Saint of Cabora.
Misc. Information: Urrea spent nearly two decades researching his own family history for material in this novel.
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (1974)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Romance
Goodreads rating: 4.27/5
Goodreads summary: In this honest and stunning novel, James Baldwin has given America a moving story of love in the face of injustice. Told through the eyes of Tish, a nineteen-year-old girl, in love with Fonny, a young sculptor who is the father of her child, Baldwin’s story mixes the sweet and the sad. Tish and Fonny have pledged to get married, but Fonny is falsely accused of a terrible crime and imprisoned. Their families set out to clear his name, and as they face an uncertain future, the young lovers experience a kaleidoscope of emotions-affection, despair, and hope. In a love story that evokes the blues, where passion and sadness are inevitably intertwined, Baldwin has created two characters so alive and profoundly realized that they are unforgettably ingrained in the American psyche.
Misc. Information: This is Baldwin’s only novel with a female narrator.
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (2019)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Historical fiction
Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Goodreads rating: 4.26/5
Goodreads summary: Elwood Curtis has taken the words of Dr Martin Luther King to heart: he is as good as anyone. Abandoned by his parents, brought up by his loving, strict and clear-sighted grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But given the time and the place, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy his future, and so Elwood arrives at The Nickel Academy, which claims to provide ‘physical, intellectual and moral training’ which will equip its inmates to become ‘honorable and honest men’.
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a chamber of horrors, where physical, emotional and sexual abuse is rife, where corrupt officials and tradesmen do a brisk trade in supplies intended for the school, and where any boy who resists is likely to disappear ‘out back’. Stunned to find himself in this vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold on to Dr King’s ringing assertion, ‘Throw us in jail, and we will still love you.’ But Elwood’s fellow inmate and new friend Turner thinks Elwood is naive and worse; the world is crooked, and the only way to survive is to emulate the cruelty and cynicism of their oppressors.
Misc. Information: The Nickel Academy is based on a real reform school from Florida, the Dozier School for Boys. Officials reported that the school was “nothing more than a prison” when they finally shut it down after 111 years of operation. Read this article from The Washington Post to learn more.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (2019)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Epistolary novel
Goodreads rating: 4.05/5
Goodreads summary: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
Misc. Information: Producers announced in 2020 that the movie version of the novel is coming.
On Such a Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee (2014)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Dystopian
Goodreads rating: 3.49/5
Goodreads summary: In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class – descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China – find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement.
In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Science fiction/dystopian
Awards: New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Goodreads rating: 4.2/5
Goodreads summary: n 2025, with the world descending into madness and anarchy, one woman begins a fateful journey toward a better future.
Lauren Olamina and her family live in one of the only safe neighborhoods remaining on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Behind the walls of their defended enclave, Lauren’s father, a preacher, and a handful of other citizens try to salvage what remains of a culture that has been destroyed by drugs, disease, war, and chronic water shortages. While her father tries to lead people on the righteous path, Lauren struggles with hyperempathy, a condition that makes her extraordinarily sensitive to the pain of others.
Misc. Information: Parable of the Sower is the first in a two-book series called Earthseed. Novel #2 is called Parable of the Talents.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2012)
Author origin: Nigeria
Genre: Post-colonial fiction
Awards: Commonwealth Writers’ Prize: Best First Book
Goodreads rating: 4.18/5
Goodreads summary: Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They’re completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.
Misc. Information: Adichie’s novel Americanah (2013) is a popular novel among AP Lit teachers and is destined to be a choice on the open question one day as well. You might as well add it to your reading list while you’re making it.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
Author origin: England
Genre: Epistolary novel
Goodreads rating: 3.68/5
Goodreads summary: Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God.
Misc. Information: Many consider Robinson Crusoe to be the first English novel.
Sweat by Lynn Nottage (2015)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Play
Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Goodreads rating: 4.15/5
Goodreads summary: In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggles to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near futures. Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it’s even in their sights.
Misc. Information: Lynn Nottage extensively interviewed the residents of Reading, Pennsylvania to research for this play. Their experiences fuel the play’s themes on working class living and economic decline in America.
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1847-1848)
Author origin: England
Genre: Satire
Goodreads rating: 3.79/5
Goodreads summary: A novel that chronicles the lives of two women who could not be more different: Becky Sharp, an orphan whose only resources are her vast ambitions, her native wit, and her loose morals; and her schoolmate Amelia Sedley, a typically naive Victorian heroine, the pampered daughter of a wealthy family.
Misc. Information: The novel has been attached to several subtitles, including “Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society” and “A Novel Without a Hero.”
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)
Author origin: India
Genre: Picaresque novel
Goodreads rating: 3.76/5
Goodreads summary: Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village’s wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man’s (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram’s new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly (“Love — Rape — Revenge!”), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive.
Misc. Information: The novel was adapted into a film in 2021 and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the same year.
Repeated Titles from the Open Question
That’s all the new titles for 2022, but certainly not all of the books included for the open question this year. The following titles were also suggested for the open question and have been listed as an option before. Titles marked with a * denote a popular title, having been suggested for the open question ten or more times.
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller*
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
- The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison*
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë*
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Love Medicine by Louise Erdich
- The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
- Native Son by Richard Wright*
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Othello by William Shakespeare*
- A Passage to India by E. M. Forster*
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry*
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston*
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë*
Before closing, let’s not forget to highlight the texts chosen for Question 1 (poetry) and Question 2 (prose) of 2022.
Question 1: “Shaving” by Richard Blanco
Richard Blanco holds many accolades as a poet. In 2013, he recited his poem “One Today” at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. He was the youngest, the first immigrant, and the first openly gay U. S. inaugural poet at that time. Currently, Blanco works as a professor and the first Education Ambassador for the Academy of American Poets. His work “Shaving” can be found in his collection City of a Hundred Fires. To learn more about Richard Blanco you can check out his website.
Question 2: People of the Whale by Linda Hogan (2008)
Author origin: USA
Genre: Magical realism
Goodreads rating: 4/5
Goodreads summary: Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.
To view all the titles used for the open question, check out this free download from my TpT store. You can use this to help inform your choices in cultivating a student library, selecting whole class reads, or your own personal reading.
[…] You should also check out Gina Kortuem’s post: Breaking Down the 2022 AP Lit Titles […]