“What books can help me enhance my Reading Test score in ACT/SAT?”

This is a common question posed by ambitious students. Although the solution is not as easy as you would think, the three simple ideas below can assist you in creating your own unique ACT/SAT reading list to prepare for your standardized exam!

1) Read whatever you can get your hands on.

If you don’t consider yourself to be a strong reader, pick any book or magazine that interests you and dive right in! Reading something you enjoy will keep you interested and help you become a more fluid reader without you realising it, whether you’re learning about cutting-edge technical breakthroughs or going on an epic fantasy journey.

2) Make active reading a habit.

Reading a book for school is typically a passive activity. You’re reading at a leisurely pace, following the plot and allowing information to sink in over the course of several hours or even days.

You’ll need to be an active reader on the ACT and SAT, skimming and scanning chapters to rapidly identify and decipher key information. As you read, move your pencil over the page, underlining key concepts such thesis statements and context hints from particular questions. This is not how you would read in school.

3) Concentrate on your flaws.

On both the ACT and the SAT, passages follow a highly predictable pattern:

ACT: each passage is around 800 words long and covers a variety of themes such as fiction, social science, humanities, and natural science.

SAT: each passage is 500-750 words long and covers themes from American/world literature, history/social studies, and science.

Knowing what sorts of passages to expect will help you select what you should concentrate on while you prepare for your reading test, as some genres may be more difficult than others. Some kids, for example, struggle with science sections that include unfamiliar vocabulary. Others have a harder time with narratives containing a lot of conversation. Others may have difficulty understanding historical sections written in an earlier form of English.

The books listed below have been carefully chosen to provide you a comprehensive overview of the sorts of texts you could face on a collegiate standardised test while also addressing typical student shortcomings.

Make sure to use active reading strategies while you read each speech, essay, or story—skim each piece (or at least the first few paragraphs) and attempt to focus on essential themes and crucial details. When you come across an unfamiliar term, attempt to develop your own guess based on the context. Consider the use of metaphors, repetition, and other rhetorical strategies in your writing. These books are excellent additions to your ACT/SAT reading list:

THE CLASSICS

• Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by William Safire
• 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology by Samuel Cohen
• Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces by Mark Mills
• Speed Reading in 60 Seconds: 100 One-Minute Speed Reading Sprints by David Butler

LESS THAN 100 PAGES

• Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
• Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville

THE LONGER ONES

• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
• Candide by Voltaire
• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

NOVELS FROM THE 19TH CENTURY

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot
• Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

SOCIAL SCIENCE

• Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker

SCIENTIFIC SAGAS

• Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott
• The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

MAGAZINES

• The New Yorker
• Nature
• Time
• The Hindus

Good luck with your reading!! Please contact us for a free consultation if you have any questions concerning SAT/ACT test preparation.