<p>I'm pretty worried because I frequently waste a lot of time rereading CR passages to grasp their meanings better. Before I started preparing for SAT last month, I read occasionally and at a fairly low level too (books by Dan Brown, John Grisham, and other crappy authors). I have till October to improve my reading, so what would you suggest that I read? Should I go for magazines like New Yorker and Times that some posts here mention? It's best if you could recommend a source that has short stories or articles. Thanks.</p>
<p>Definitely the NYTimes, particularly the Sunday Book Review and Magazine sections. The New Yorker is great too. And just read a bunch of novels this summer. My son actually recognized some of the novels he’s read during his 2 SATs, such as “A Room with a View” and “The Color of Water.” He got lucky that way.</p>
<p>Oh, and also read the Tuesday NYTimes Science section for the science passages.</p>
<p>The Economist.</p>
<p>Your school textbooks no lie.</p>
<p>^No, I tried. Seriously. However, maybe an English textbook, especially your AP English textbook, would help.</p>
<p>Lol, maybe not your science textbook. I’ve been studying for AP US so I started reading the US textbook from the beginning.</p>
<p>Actually, I wanted to say “Time” in my post but added the s at the end by mistake. But thanks, I’ll definitely add NY Times to my reading list :D. But novels scare me so I’ll probably continue avoiding them. And your son DID get very lucky RenaissanceMom! Even if he hadn’t remembered the exact substance of the extracts it must have paid to have had been familiar with the content. </p>
<p>I don’t know about AP textbooks though, Mook. Are you talking about the AP US History book? I have Peterson’s, Cliffs, McGraw-Hill and a For-Dummies book for APUSH though we can’t take APs in my country. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Never mind then. I meant that you should read the textbook the school usually gives you, but since you don’t have any then the NY Times and Time magazine should suffice. Good Luck.</p>
<p>what about novels? which ones are SAT CR caliber?</p>
<p>This is Collegeboard’s 101 Great Books list for the college-bound student. Most of these classics are novels but some are plays. I’ve seen a lot of people recommending many of these books for SAT CR passages.<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools;
<p>AUTHOR - BOOK
unknown - Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son</p>