Hey guys,
As you know, school is almost out and we have received the books we must read over the summer for AP Lang for next year. These books are Of Mice and Men, Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, & The Grapes of Wrath. I am planning to buy all of them, however, I wanted to ask anybody who was already taken this class, would you recommend I buy the cliff notes that go along with each book? I wanted know if they would be useful and are worth spending money on.
Thanks for the help
I would lean towards no, at least for now. Read the books and jot down your own analysis/use free online resources (which there are plenty of). If you’re finding that you can’t keep up during class, then consider.
Probably doesn’t matter much, but are you sure that’s for LANG??
@bodangles These are all for ap Lang
Don’t you think you’d be better off reading the books and developing your own perceptions as opposed to letting some person named Cliff tell you what to think about them?
That’s strange. You’d think they wouldn’t assign fiction books for a class that deals almost entirely with nonfiction.
Thats odd, my summer reading list only consists ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Outliers’ . Plus a ridiculous amount of vocabulary charts and other stuff for the actual exam. Guess it’s different in other places 
Weird selection, I had one nonfiction book over the summer and then we just read Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn during the year. You should be fine with just the books, if you need analysis help theres always sparknotes.
It’s not really that unusual to have fiction books for AP Lang; I read a few last year, including Gatsby. While AP Lang mostly focuses on nonfiction books, it also had to meet the requirements for my state’s 11th grade English standards, which is mostly fiction reading, so we had to read some of both.
Anyways, OP, don’t waste money. If you ever have trouble understanding a book or chapter, you can just Google and find free analyses and synopses.
Thanks for all the info. Btw, we do also have to read Outliers and Fast Food Nation along with those 4 books
Almost everything I read in Lang this year was fiction, besides essays and one nonfiction book. Grapes of Wrath is a loooooooooooong book that I never finished, haha.
@tigerman333 I had to read FFN, too! A lot of my classmates didn’t like it, but I thought it was well-written and fairly interesting. Definitely take notes as you read it, because while it’s not at all hard to understand, it covers a few different things that you won’t remember without notes.
I guess my school is just weird then! We didn’t touch a single fiction book. Had to read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, A Modest Proposal, Utilitarianism, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, stuff like that. I don’t miss that class at all. 
I read the A modest proposal
I don’t cliff notes because reading the book by itself improves analysis skills, only if I’m desperate will I go to cliffnotes, sparknotes, etc.
As others said, just buy the books and research online if you need help. I’m jealous of the books that you have to read - my school assigned us The Great Gatsby, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Their Eyes Were Watching God and the worst of all - The Gate Keepers (it made me question everything about my chances for college!)
I don’t have to read anything…