I am probably going to draw the ire of some of the people on the forum for this (literature people, especially), but the problem with what you are choosing to read is that it is all FICTION!!! There is nothing wrong with reading fiction, of course, but most of the reading on the SAT is non-fiction and I would argue that most of the reading that you will do in your life, including in college (unless you are a lit major or something like that), will be non-fiction. Herein lies the problem that so many students face on the SAT! Most of the reading they do in HS (outside of textbook reading) is fiction, but most of what is on the SAT and most of what you encounter in the real world is non-fiction.
So you really need to be reading non-fiction sources in my opinion. You could read books or you could read articles. Articles would be much better in my opinion because they are short (like SAT passages) so they are more similar, plus you give yourself the opportunity of reading and attacking many different pieces in the time it would take to read only 1 book. For articles, newspaper opinion pieces (like in the New York Times) are a good starting point. Another really good resource is Arts and Letters Daily, which pools together links to interesting scholarly articles and opinion pieces so you could choose one that interests you. The level of difficulty of those articles is on average higher than your typical newspaper opinion piece, just fyi. As for books, Erica Meltzer has a good list in The Critical Reader of books that are on the level of what appears on the SAT (and exerpts from many of them have appeared as passages on the actual SAT). I don’t have the book in front of me right now but when I have a chance I will post to the thread with some of her suggestions. Off the top of my head, one book I would recommend is Guns, Germs, and Steal. It is SAT-like and it is a very interesting book (to me at least).
Also, @dialga2014, I decided to start a thread on CC where I will post a link to an article (non-fiction of course) and then ask some questions about it in an effort to help people read more critically and actively. Hopefully people will post in with some responses so that there can be some discussion about the article and hopefully this can help you directly since I will be trying to choose the best articles I can for this purpose and the questions themselves will help force you to read the passage in an active and critical way. So if you are interested, look out for a new thread (I will try to post it in the next 24hrs and will try to post new articles as often as I can) and please feel free to respond to the questions.
