Parents often ask how their eighth or ninth grader can start preparing for the SAT. My answer is simple. READ MORE! Voracious readers invariably have an advantage when they start preparing for the SAT, and ultimately score higher. There is a strong correlation between how much a student reads and his or her vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and writing. Reading is truly fundamental!
A good place to start may be with a list provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Lexile score is a rubric by which some measure the “difficulty level” of books. While the Lexile measurement is not perfect, it does provide some guidance for the reading level.
You can download a PDF version of the list here.
| Title | Author | ISBN | Lexile |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1984 | Orwell, George | 452262933 | 1090 |
| A Death in the Family | Agee, James | 375701230 | 1020 |
| A Doll's House | Ibsen, Henrik | 486270629 | |
| A Handful of Dust | Waugh, Evelyn | ||
| A Man for All Seasons | Bolt, Robert | ||
| A Passage to India | Forster, E.M. | 156711427 | 950 |
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | Joyce, James | 671015389 | 1120 |
| A Streetcar Named Desire | Williams, Tennessee | 451167783 | |
| A Town Like Alice | Shute, Nevil | 345353749 | 870 |
| Abraham Lincoln | Sandburg, Carl | 156026112 | 1170 |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Twain, Mark | 059043389X | 990 |
| Against All Hope | Valladares, Armando | ||
| All Quiet on the Western Front | Remarque, Erich Maria | 449213943 | 830 |
| All the King's Men | Warren, Robert Penn | 156004801 | 1130 |
| An American Tragedy | Dreiser, Theodore | 451524659 | 1240 |
| Animal Farm | Orwell, George | 451526341 | 1170 |
| Anna Karenina | Tolstoy, Leo | 451524497 | 1080 |
| Babbitt | Lewis, Sinclair | 451527089 | 1110 |
| Barchester Towers | Trollope, Anthony | 140432035 | 1090 |
| Beowulf | Anonymous | 719051460 | 1160 |
| Brave New World | Huxley, Aldous | 60809833 | 870 |
| Candide | Voltaire | 553211668 | 1110 |
| Collected Short Stories | Welty, Eudora | 156189216 | 980 |
| Crime and Punishment | Dostoevsky, Fyodor | 192833839 | 990 |
| Cyrano de Bergerac | Rostand, Edmond | 451525485 | |
| Darkness at Noon | Koestler, Arthur | ||
| Doctor Zhivago | Pasternak, Boris | 679774386 | 1010 |
| Don Quixote | Cervantes, Miguel de | 451525078 | 1410 |
| Dr. Faustus | Marlowe, Christopher | ||
| Essays | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | ||
| Fathers and Sons | Turgenev, Ivan | ||
| For Whom the Bell Tolls | Hemingway, Ernest | 684803356 | 840 |
| Go Tell It on the Mountain | Baldwin, James | 440330076 | 1030 |
| Great Expectations | Dickens, Charles | 883013886 | 1200 |
| Gulliver's Travels | Swift, Jonathan | 192833774 | 1210 |
| Hamlet | Shakespeare, William | 192834169 | 1390 |
| How Green Was My Valley | Llewellyn, Richard | 684825554 | 1090 |
| I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Angelou, Maya | 553279378 | 1070 |
| I, Claudius | Graves, Robert | ||
| Inherit the Wind | Lawrence, Jerome & Robert E. Lee | 553269151 | 850 |
| Invisible Man | Ellison, Ralph | 679732764 | 950 |
| Jane Eyre | Bronte, Charlotte | 679424725 | 890 |
| King Lear | Shakespeare, William | 486280586 | |
| Les Miserables | Hugo, Victor | 449300021 | 990 |
| Long Day's Journey into Night | O'Neill, Eugene | 300046014 | |
| Look Homeward, Angel | Wolfe, Thomas | ||
| Lord Jim | Conrad, Joseph | 140180923 | 1110 |
| Lord of the Flies | Golding, William | 399501487 | 770 |
| Madame Bovary | Flaubert, Gustave | 451523873 | 1030 |
| Moby Dick | Melville, Herman | 899664784 | 1200 |
| Moll Flanders | Defoe, Daniel | 679602607 | 1390 |
| Much Ado About Nothing | Shakespeare, William | ||
| Murder in the Cathedral | Eliot, T. S. | 156632772 | |
| My Antonia | Cather, Willa | 899669778 | 1010 |
| Native Son | Wright, Richard | 60929804 | 700 |
| Night | Wiesel, Elie | 553272535 | 590 |
| Oedipus Rex | Sophocles | ||
| Of Human Bondage | Maugham, W. Somerset | 055321392X | 910 |
| Of Mice and Men | Steinbeck, John | 055327824X | 630 |
| One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Solzhenitsyn, Alexander | 679444645 | 900 |
| Our Town | Wilder, Thornton | ||
| Poems | Dickinson, Emily | ||
| Poems | Hughes, Langston | ||
| Poems | Keats, John | ||
| Pride and Prejudice | Austen, Jane | 059008576X | 1100 |
| Profiles in Courage | Kennedy, John F. | 60806982 | 1410 |
| Pygmalion | Shaw, George Bernard | 003053299X | |
| Rabbit, Run | Updike, John | 449911659 | 960 |
| Short stories | Poe, Edgar Allan | ||
| Silas Marner | Eliot, George | 486292460 | 1330 |
| Sonnets | Shakespeare, William | ||
| Sons and Lovers | Lawrence, D.H. | 1555460240 | 1200 |
| Steppenwolf | Hesse, Hermann | ||
| Stories ("The Gift of the Magi," "The Ransom of Red Chief,") | Henry, O | ||
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Hardy, Thomas | 067101546X | 1160 |
| The Aeneid | Virgil | 486287491 | |
| The Age of Innocence | Wharton, Edith | 140282165 | 1170 |
| The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | Franklin, Benjamin | 684841967 | 1370 |
| The Caine Mutiny | Wouk, Herman | 316955108 | 910 |
| The Canterbury Tales | Chaucer, Geoffrey | 1853264369 | |
| The Catcher in the Rye | Salinger, J.D. | 791056643 | 1330 |
| The Cherry Orchard | Chekhov, Anton | ||
| The Chocolate War | Cormier, Robert | 440900328 | 820 |
| The Chosen | Potok, Chaim | 449213447 | 970 |
| The Crucible | Miller, Arthur | 140481389 | |
| The Cruel Sea | Monsarrat, Nicholas | ||
| The Divine Comedy | Dante | 195087402 | 1270 |
| The Forsyte Saga | Galsworthy, John | 192838628 | 990 |
| The Fountainhead | Rand, Ayn | 452273331 | 780 |
| The Good Earth | Buck, Pearl | 671729896 | 1530 |
| The Great Gatsby | Fitzgerald, F. Scott | 684801523 | 1070 |
| The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter | McCullers, Carson | 553269631 | 760 |
| The Iliad | Homer | 872203530 | 1160 |
| The Jungle | Sinclair, Upton | 252014804 | 1170 |
| The Lord of the Rings | Tolkien, J. R. R. | ||
| The Magic Mountain | Mann, Thomas | 679772871 | 1350 |
| The Moonstone | Collins, Wilkie | 192834711 | 1040 |
| The Nine Tailors | Sayers, Dorothy L | 156658992 | 910 |
| The Odyssey | Homer | 872204855 | 1130 |
| The Once and Future King | White, T.H. | 441627404 | 1080 |
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | Wilde, Oscar | 192833650 | 970 |
| The Power and the Glory | Greene, Graham | 140184996 | 710 |
| The Red Badge of Courage | Crane, Stephen | 590021176 | 900 |
| The Scarlet Letter | Hawthorne, Nathaniel | 812504836 | 1340 |
| The School for Scandal | Sheridan, Richard Brinsley | ||
| The Sound and the Fury | Faulkner, William | 75536668 | 870 |
| The Stranger | Camus, Albert | 679720200 | 880 |
| The Trial | Kafka, Franz | 805210407 | 1150 |
| The Turn of the Screw | James, Henry | 393096696 | 1140 |
| Their Eyes Were Watching God | Hurston, Zora Neale | 60931418 | 1080 |
| Things Fall Apart | Achebe, Chinua | 679446230 | 890 |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Lee, Harper | 446310786 | 870 |
| To the Lighthouse | Woolf, Virginia | 156030470 | 1030 |
| Tom Jones | Fielding, Henry | 192834975 | 1360 |
| Uncle Tom's Cabin | Stowe, Harriet Beecher | 679602003 | 1050 |
| Vanity Fair | Thackeray, William Makepeace | 140430350 | 1270 |
| Walden | Thoreau, Henry David | 1400818540 | 1340 |
| Wise Blood | O'Connor, Flannery | 374530637 | 920 |
| Wuthering Heights | Bronte, Emily | 590460307 | 880 |
