19 Best AP Lit Book List (2022)

Table of Contents

What is AP Lit?

AP English Literature and Composition is designed for students who are interested in literature, want to do further research and study on it, and are willing to accept high-intensity learning challenges.

The purpose of the course is to cultivate students’ professional ability of critical reading and analytical writing through a large number of inquiry learning of literary originals in various periods and genres.

Students can not only gain a deep understanding of literary works, but also have the ability of critical thinking and analysis that can be used for a lifetime. The combination of reading and writing, a large amount of reading and writing is the core of this course.

Suitable for students:

Students interested in literature, students who want to study literature, history and philosophy in the future, or students who want to strengthen their literary literacy.

Examination objectives:

This examination aims to cultivate students to master two basic abilities required to improve their literary literacy:

● Be able to read and understand a lot of literary works (including poetry, novels and dramas). Fully understand the author’s writing intention, analyze the writing background, the author’s attitude and tone, so as to understand the deep meaning of literary works.

● Be able to read and analyze literary works from different perspectives, such as the personality of the protagonist, the expression and writing methods of the author, and rhetorical devices, such as pun, parallelism, simile, metaphor, contradictory rhetoric, etc

Examination content:

Section I accounts for 45% of the total score 55 multiple choice questions 60 minutes

Section II accounts for 55% of the total score 3 discussion questions 120 minutes

Essays include: poetry appreciation writing (6 points), prose novel analysis writing (6 points), and literary argument analysis writing (6 points)

AP Exams are given every year in May. 2023 AP Exam is comming, 2023 AP Exam Calendar

Best AP Lit Book List in 2022

There are three subjective questions in AP Literature and Composition. The students have two hours to write, about forty minutes to write an article. Question 1 is about poetry, question 2 is about prose, and question 3 is about openness. For the last subjective question, students are generally required to extract relevant knowledge from the classics of English literature for analysis.

The Best AP Lit Book List varies from year to year, and 30 literary works were mentioned in 2016-2021.

1. 19 have been selected more than 2 times in 2016-2021 in AP Lit Exam

2. 8 have been selected more than 3 times in the past 7 years.

3. Which period is the most popular literature

Of the eight most commonly used novels, half were published in the 19th century. The rest of the books range from the 17th century to the 20th century, excluding 18th century publications.

4. Which country’s literature is a popular examination site?

Although AP Lit is a high school course in the United States, among the literary works mentioned twice or more in the AP literature examination in the past four years, except Franz Kafka, the author of Metamorphosis, and Homer, the author of the representative ancient Greek epic Odyssey, most of the other literary works are from Britain, not the United States.

Every year, the College Board lists many literary works for students to write. Among the hundreds of key recommended books, which literary works are the most important and have been mentioned many times in the AP Literature Examination in the past decade?