It’s a great idea to bulk up your reading list while you’re preparing and studying for the SAT.
Did you know that frequent readers tend to do better on the Writing and Critical Reading portions of the SAT, which make up more than 50 percent of the test questions? It’s a great idea to bulk up your reading list while you’re preparing and studying for the SAT.
Below, we’ve put together a list of recommended reading materials for college-bound students that will help to hone your reading comprehension and vocabulary skills. Don’t let what may sound like boring classics fool you, there are many adventures to be had here. Not only will you garner SAT skills, but you will be a step ahead for your future college reading assignments.
Title |
Author |
| A Doll’s House | Henrik Ibsen |
| A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway |
| An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison |
| Candide | Voltaire |
| Collected Stories | Eudora Welty |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Rostand, Edmond |
| Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak |
| Fathers and Sons | Ivan Turgenev |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley |
| Gulliver’s Travels | Jonathan Swift |
| Inferno | Dante |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë |
| Long Day’s Journey into Night | Eugene O’Neill |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding |
| Macbeth | William Shakespeare |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville |
| Oedipus Rex | Sophocles |
| One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Marquez |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen |
| Robinson Crusoe | Daniel Defoe |
| Romeo and Juliet | William Shakespeare |
| Selected Essays | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
| Selected Tales | Edgar Allan Poe |
| The Awakening | Kate Chopin |
| The Call of the Wild | London, Jack |
| The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer |
| The Catcher in the Rye | J.D. Salinger |
| The Color Purple | Alice Walker |
| The Crying of Lot 49 | Pynchon, Thomas |
| The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford |
| The Great Gatsby | Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Last of the Mohicans | James Fenimore Cooper |
| The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka |
| The Mill on the Floss | George Eliot |
| The Odyssey | Homer |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde |
| The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| The Turn of the Screw | Henry James |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Lee, Harper |
| To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf, |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| Waiting for Godot | Samuel Beckett |
| Walden | Henry David Thoreau |