“Summer Reading” 2021: books used in global teaching and learning this school year
Thinking of adding to or changing your course’s reading list? Thinking of supporting teachers in bringing more global perspectives and narratives into your school’s curriculum?
Below are select titles that were shared this year within the GEBG Community as particularly meaningful and effective texts for teaching global competencies to students across grade levels and subject areas.
Particular thanks to Dacel Casey, Director of Community and Global Partnerships and MS & US Library Media Specialist at Trevor Day School (NY), and to Christina Dominique-Pierre, Middle School Library Director at BB&N (MA). Additional thanks to Manjula Salomon, Palmer Trinity School (FL); Sravani Sen-Das, Groton School (MA); Dave Thompson, Hotchkiss School (CT); Jessica Yonzon, Ravenscroft (NC); and Juliette Zener, Belmont Hill School (MA).
Have a great summer!
Primary School Texts
- 47,000 Beads; Koha Adeyoha, Angel Adeyoha, and Holly McGillis
- A Bike Like Sergio’s, Maribeth Boelts
- A Boy and a Jaguar, Alan Rabinowitz
- A Boy Like You, Frank Murphy
- A Chair For My Mother, Vera B Williams
- Ada’s Violin, Susan Hood
- A Different Pond, Bao Phi
- All About Families, Felicity Brooks
- All Because You Matter, Tami Charles
- A Map Into The World, Kao Kalia Yang
- A Shelter in Our Car, Monica Gunning
- Between Us and Abuela, Mitali Perkins
- Door, Jihyeon Lee
- Drawn Together, Minh Le
- Dreamers, Yuyi Morales
- Emmanuel’s Dream: The True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah, Laurie Ann Thompson
- Evelyn del Rey is Moving Away, Meg Medina (also available in Spanish)
- Families Around the World, Margaret Ruurs
- First Laugh: Welcome Baby!, Rose Ann Tahe & Nancy Bo Flood
- From Far Away, Robert Munsch
- Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, Kevin Noble Maillard
- In Our Mother’s House, Patricia Polacco
- Inside Out and Back Again, Thanhhà Lai
- Is There Really a Human Race, Jamie Lee Curtis & Laura Cornell
- I’m like you, You’re Like Me, Cindy Gainer
- Julián is a Mermaid, Jessica Love
- Libba, Veirs and Tatyana Fazlalizad
- Lubna and Pebble, Wendy Meddour
- Malaika’s Costume, Nadia Hohn
- Mama Zooms, Jane Cowen
- Mango, Abuela, and Me, Meg Medina (also available in Spanish)
- Merci Suárez Changes Gears, Meg Medina (also available in Spanish)
- Migrant, Maxine Trottier
- My Papi Has a Motorcycle, Isabel Quintero
- New Year, Rich Lo
- Silent Lotus, Jeanne Lee
- Sulwe, Lupita Nyong’o
- Thanking the Moon: Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, Grace Lin
- Thank You Omu!, Oge Mora
- The Hard Times Jar, Ethel Footman Smothers
- The Only Child, Guojing
- The Remember Balloons, Jesse Oliveros
- The Water Princess, Susan Verde
- This Is How We Do It: One Day in the Lives of Seven Kids from around the World, Matt Lamothe
- Thunderboy Jr., Sherman Alexie
- Yo Soy Muslim: A Father’s Letter to His Daughter, Mark Gonzales
Middle School Texts
- Born a Crime (Adapted for Young Readers), Trevor Noah
- Elsewhere, Home, Leila Aboulela
- Enrique’s Journey, Sonia Nazaro
- Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
- I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World, Malala Yousafzai, Patricia McCormick (With)
- I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Erika L. Sánchez
- Lion: A Long Way Home Young Readers’ Edition, Sairoo Brierley
- Lion Island: Cuba’s Warrior of Words, Margarita Engle
- March (Trilogy), John Lewis
- My Family Divided: One Girl’s Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope, Diane Guerrero
- Other Words for Home, Jasmine Warga
- Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference, Warren St. John
- Refugee, Alan Grantz
- The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba
- The Surrender Tree/El árbol de la rendición: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom/Poemas de la Lucha de Cuba por su Libertad, Margarita Engle
- We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World, Malala Yousafzai
- When I was Puerto Rican, Esmerlada Santiago
- When Stars are Scattered, Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed
- Your Heart, My Sky: Love in a Time of Hunger, Margarita Engle
High School Fiction
- All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel, Anthony Doerr
- A Single Pebble, John Hersey
- A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
- From the Inside Quietly, Eloisa Amezcua
- Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel, Bernardine Evaristo
- God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
- In The Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
- Kindred, Octavia Butler
- Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat
- Last Days of the Mighty Mekong, Brian Eyler
- Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
- Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Yasunari Kawabata
- Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
- Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- “Sleep” (short story), Haruki Murakami
- Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel, Lisa See
- Stories of Your Life, Ted Chiang
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, Sandy Tolan
- The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Paper Menagerie, Ken Liu
- The River Between, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
- The Singing Mountaineers. Songs and Tales of the Quechua People, Collected by José María Arguedas
- What is the What, Dave Eggers (written as fiction but based on a real person and his story)
- When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
- White Tiger, Arvind Adiga
High School Nonfiction
- 1491: New revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles Mann
- A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, Ronald Takaki
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah
- A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
- Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, Muhammad Yunus
- Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity, Katherine Boo
- Between the World and Me, Ta Nahesi Coates
- Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson
- Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine
- Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
- Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling
- Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, Karen Armstrong
- First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung
- Full Planet, Empty Plates: The Geopolitics of Food Scarcity, Lester R. Brown
- God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire And the Making of the Modern World, Alan Mikhail
- Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
- Leaving Microsoft to Change the World, John Wood (Founder of ‘Room to Read’)
- Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder
- Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Politics and Culture in Modern America), Keisha N. Blain
- The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, Diane Ackerman
- The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright
- The Radical Element: 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes & other Dauntless Girls, Meg Medina
- The Return: Fathers, Sons And The Land In Between, Hisham Matar
- The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, Anne Fadiman
- They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan; Benjamin Ajak, Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, and Judy A. Bernstein
- Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Svetlana Alexievich
Compilations of Resources
- Best Books of 2020 (Librarians at Wheeler School, RI)
- Books for Expanding Global Understanding (George Ramos at Chadwick School, CA)
- GEBG Global Bookshelf (a series of book reviews written by volunteer educators)
- Human Rights Watch Recommended Reading List
- Speakers from Previous GEBG Events
- Summer Reading List for 7th & 8th grade families at BB&N, MA