At Taft we believe in the importance of asking students and faculty to engage in reading as it is an essential part of pursuing life long learning. Our summer reading program consists of two parts: an All School read that is thematically connected to our speakers for the school year and a Grade Level read that will prepare students for discussions in their English classes in the fall.
Theme for the Year
For the 2026-2027 school year, the Taft community will ask, "What does creativity look like in the 21st century?" We will explore this question through our summer reading, with external speakers and performances, and as we hear from members of our community and discuss this theme throughout the year. In addition to the artists we might most readily associate with the topic of creativity, we will consider the role and power of creativity in technology, politics, religion, capitalism, mathematics, and more.
Faculty and students at Taft can select one of the following texts to complete the all school read.
The Summer Reading Committee is excited to announce that the all school summer read this year offers two options; faculty and students are asked to choose between The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green or The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. When students and faculty return to Taft in the fall, there will be dedicated time to discuss each novel in small groups led by seniors and faculty. Students will also have an opportunity to engage in the tangible activity of letter writing or reviewing to express their own creativity within these mediums.
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
John Green’s work is a collection of personal essays that showcases the intricacies of the shared human experience of our current geological age. Each essay, from Diet Dr. Pepper to Halley’s Comet, explores Green’s own take on the contribution that these events have made to our planet while also exploring how humanity has been the primary driver of environmental change. While this is one of the few non fiction works Green has produced, his trademark wit and enthusiastic voice permeates through the pages of this book transforming normal historical events into something more.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Virginia Evan’s debut epistolary novel The Correspondent follows the life of main character Sybil Van Antwerp and the myriad of letters that she sends to her family, famous authors, and a mysterious recipient from her past. While fighting to hold on to the art of writing a physical letter, Sybil slowly comes to terms with all of the regrets and joys that she has experienced in her life while also encouraging those around her to value analog communication. The Correspondent is a poignant exploration of how we connect beyond the screen and a hopeful reminder that no mistake is too old to be forgiven.
Find your designated grade level novel below to complete your English Class Summer Read.
While classes begin formally at Taft on September 8 and end May 30 with commencement ceremony, the act of learning should extend beyond these arbitrary dates. The months of June to August are—for teachers and students alike—a precious time to read slowly and think deeply, to reflect and imagine—without any hovering assessment or reading quiz the next day. We at Taft believe reading is more than just a homework assignment; it is an essential habit of lifelong education.
This summer, each student must read one of the all-school reads (The Correspondent or The Anthropocene) and their grade-level read. Incoming lower mids will read Everything Sad is Untrue; incoming Mids will read Black Swan Green; incoming Upper Mids will read There There; and all Seniors and PGs will read In Other Words.
Each of these grade-level books addresses the core themes of their respective grade (self, community, leadership, and impact) and each will enrich students’ experience of their books for the whole year. Students are expected to read their grade-level book since it will form the basis of the first weeks of school and their first assessments in their English classes (seminar discussions, presentations, passage analyses). Students should consult the annotation guide for strategies on active reading but—most importantly of all—students should read with excitement about how they will talk about these books with their new classmates in the opening weeks of classes.
Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad Is Untrue (a true story) is a fictionalized autobiographical novel based on the author’s experience as an Iranian refugee in America. The central character, Khosrou (or “Daniel” as he is known in his school), speaks three languages but has not yet found his own voice. Only twelve years old, he has a lifetime of stories to share: his family’s escape from Iran after his mother’s conversion to Christianity, his brief internment in Italy as a refugee to be processed, his final move to America and his struggle to adjust to life in Oklahoma—and his first taste of peanut butter and marshmallows. Everything Sad Is Untrue is both a gripping story of an asylum-seeker and the whimsical tale of a resilient boy discovering a bigger world, perplexed by everything in his new home country: from toilet seats to BBQ potlucks to football tribalism.
This book offers a perfect starting point for the signature question of the lower mid year, “Who am I?” By reading Daniel’s story and the story of him learning to tell his story, students will think about their own journeys, both literal and metaphorical, to school and to self-discovery.
Mid
Thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor — struggling with a stammer, beset by bullies, unsure of how he fits in, where he belongs, or even who he is — narrates this Bildungsroman, which takes place over the course of a single year in a village named Black Swan Green. Accompanied always by Hangman, the entity that won’t let him pronounce certain words, and sometimes by gawky friends, boorish cousins, or warring parents, Jason explores different parts of his own identity and the confines of his tiny town — discovering gradually that neither is as simple or as impervious to the world outside as he believed them to be. Most crucially, Jason reckons with the bravery that curiosity, passion, and self-knowledge require — and works to find the courage needed both to speak and to listen.
Students will find that the four seasons of Jason Taylor’s first year as a teenager make up a kind of syllabus for Mid English, a course that asks students to consider questions of identity, ways of becoming, modes of understanding, and matters of belonging. Just as Jason begins to find his voice through writing, students will enjoy opportunities to write both analytically and reflectively about the works they read and the ideas they discuss.
Upper Mid
“I just don't think it’s right to claim being Native if I don't know anything about it,” says one of the characters in Tommy Orange's There There. This is the crux for many of the characters in the novel, who are all descendants of Native Americans but who grew up in cities away from reservation land and do not have formal membership in a tribe. They are young adults who have to learn about their heritage by watching Youtube videos or studying it in college, and while they can trace their lineage to Native Americans, and while they still suffer the legacies of colonization and discrimination, they are tragically unsure about whether they can claim to be true Native Americans.
For the upper mid class, the novel complicates what it means to be part of a community—to be passionately invested in one’s cultural heritage and yet ostracized from its traditions and rites of passage, made to feel like outsiders to their own identity. In their English courses, upper mids will survey American literature and American voices but There There invites them to begin from a place of curiosity, recognizing the fractured nature of indigenous identities and the unanswerability of what it means to be American.
Seniors/PGs
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words offers a meditation on the courage it takes to start over—a theme that resonates with the threshold of senior year. Written entirely in Italian and presented as a dual-language edition, the memoir chronicles Lahiri’s obsessive, vulnerable journey to master a new tongue. For a senior class navigating the pressures of leadership and questions of personal impact, Lahiri’s narrative provides a vital lesson: true influence begins with the humility to be a beginner.
As you begin to think about writing a senior speech next year, Lahiri’s work will serve as a masterclass in translating personal experience into a more universal truth. Much as Lahiri shucks the comfort of her primary language to give birth to, and nurture a fresh, authentic voice, you will be tasked with distilling your Taft journey into a narrative that reflects some aspect of your growth. Lahiri reminds us that our impact isn’t defined by polished perfection, but by the sometimes messy metamorphosis we undergo when we step into the unknown.
