What is the best way to increase your Critical Reading score on the SAT or ACT? READ MORE! Reading a diverse array of material - news articles, science features, works of fiction - will help you develop the skills necessary to read and comprehend thoroughly the passages you will see on standardized tests. Reading critically is also a lifelong skill that will be valuable long after you receive your scores. So, when the boring car and plane trips to grandma's house for winter break begin, why not brush up on your reading? Please consider the following list our suggestion for broadening your scope. Enjoy!

Newspapers, Newsweeklies and Magazines

Fiction

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Charles Baxter, First Light
Issac Bashevis Singer, The Slave
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Edwidge Danticat, Krik' Krak!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
George Eliot, Middlemarch
William Faulkner, Light in August
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
Ernest Hemmingway, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms
Frank Herbert, Dune
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire, Prayer for Owen Meany
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw, Daisy Miller
Charles Johnson, Middle Passage
James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker
Naguib Mafouz, Arabian Nights and Days, Journey of Ibn Fattouma
Bernard Malamud, The Natural
Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon
Walter Dean Myers, Fallen Angels
Gloria Naylor, Mama Day
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
George Orwell, 1984, Animal Farm
Richard Preston, First Light
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley, Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anne Tyler, A Slipping Down Life, Breathing Lessons
Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Richard Wright, Black Boy, Native Son