Instructions
For incoming 8th graders, students are required to read two books before the end of summer. One of those two books must be chosen from the required book list below, and the second book should be chosen from the additional book list. Learn more about Aestas Libri guidelines and requirements.
Book Report Form
Download the book report forms, and print out a copy for each of the books read. Book report forms are specific to each grade level and are not interchangeable. Both book reports are required to be submitted on the first day of school, and will result in a literature completion grade.
Required Book
Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass
by Frederick Douglass
An autobiographical account by the runaway slave Frederick Douglass that chronicles his experiences with his owners and overseers and discusses how slavery affected both slaves and slaveholders.
ISBN 978-1-58049-576-9
Choose 1 additional Book
Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England. ISBN 978-0-486-82806-0
The Secret Garden
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Ten-year-old Mary comes to live in a lonely house on the Yorkshire moors and discovers an invalid cousin and the mysteries of a locked garden. ISBN 978-0-440-40055-4
Revolution is a Not a Dinner Party: a Novel
by Ying Chang Compestine
Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists’ Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed “bourgeois,” and people of laughter. ISBN 978-0-312-58149-7
And Then There Were None
by Agatha Christie
Ten strangers–each with a sordid past–are summoned by an absent millionaire to a private island off the coast of Devon and begin to die one by one upon arrival. ISBN 978-0-06-207348-8
Breaking Through
by Jimenez Francisco
Having come from Mexico to California ten years ago, fourteen-year-old Francisco is still working in the fields but fighting to improve his life and complete his education. ISBN 978-0-618-34248-8
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
A thirteen-year-old Dutch-Jewish girl records her impressions of the years she and seven others spent hiding from the Nazis before they were discovered and taken to concentration camps. ISBN 978-0-553-29698-3
Which Way Freedom?
by Joyce Hansen
Obi escapes from slavery during the Civil War, joins a black Union regiment and soon becomes involved in the bloody fighting at Fort Pillow, Tennessee. ISBN 978-0-380-71408-7
The Endless Steppe: Growing Up In Siberia
by Esther Hauzig
The author recounts the five years of hardship and trials spent in Siberia, after she and her family were arrested in Poland by the Russians as political enemies during World War II. ISBN 978-0-06-440577-5
Mrs. Kennedy and Me
by Clint Hill
A memoir of former Secret Service agent Clint Hill, discussing his time serving as bodyguard to Jacqueline Kennedy from 1960 – 1964. ISBN 978-1-45164-846-1
Across Five Aprils
by Irene Hunt
Young Jethro Creighton grows from a boy to a man when he is left to take care of the family farm in Illinois during the difficult years of the Civil War. ISBN 978-0-425-10241-1
Rifles for Watie
by Harold Keith
Sixteen-year-old Jefferson Davis Bussey cannot wait to join the Army and defend the Union against the dreaded Colonel Watie, but when he is assigned to infiltrate the enemy camp as a spy, he discovers the rebels are boys and men just like him, and he must then decide whether to betray his enemies or join them. ISBN 978-0-06-44030-8
Moccasin Trail
by Eliose Jarvis McGraw
A pioneer boy, brought up by Crow Indians, is reunited with his family and attempts to orient himself in the white man’s culture. ISBN 978-0-14-032170-8
The Wednesday Wars
by Gary Schmidt
During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker’s classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in. ISBN 978-0-618-72483-3
The Perilous Road
by William O. Steele
Fourteen-year-old Chris, bitterly hating the Yankees for invading his Tennessee mountain home, learns a difficult lesson about the waste of war and the meaning of tolerance and courage when he reports the approach of a Yankee supply troop to the Confederates, only to learn that his brother is probably part of that troop. ISBN 978-0-15-205204-1
Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
Jules Verne’s classic nineteenth-century science-fiction story about a scientist who leads a group on a treacherous journey to the center of the earth where they discover a lost civilization. ISBN 978-0-486-44088-0
The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells
After Martians land on Earth just outside of London in the later nineteenth century, an Englishman tries to find his wife while the British military and human technology fail in their efforts to stop the Martians, which have begun to kill and feed off of humans. ISBN 978-0-451-53065-3
