How to design your summer reading for a top SAT Reading score
Good SAT scores require a strong SAT Reading score: covering fictional, social science, historical, and scientific texts, the SAT Reading section necessitates a high critical Reading ability. The best way to develop this is to read a wide variety of high quality, challenging texts in the months and years leading up to your SAT. Reading such material also has very strong benefits for your school classwork, future university work, and general thinking and debate skills.
We have broken down the SAT Reading section into genres with books and articles suggestions to get you started on your academic planning. Summer is an excellent time to explore these options. The more time you can devote to reading good quality literature, the stronger position you put yourself in for autumn testing and applications. Remember, the most competitive schools have the most competitive applicants who are consistently expanding and deepening their critical thinking skills. The list below will help you join them!
Fiction
SAT Reading fiction texts can come from any century between 18th and 21st, dropping you at a point in the middle of the narrative. Our twentieth and twenty-first century recommendations include:
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Teju Cole, Open City
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day
Jorges Luis Borges, Labyrinth
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
For the nineteenth century, novels by Jane Austen, the Brönte sisters and George Elliot are fantastic places to start. From the eighteenth century, speeches and writings by Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft (available for free on Gutenberg) provide both an excellent introduction to writing style as well as insight into pivotal contemporary social thought.
Social science
Articles and opinion pieces from The Atlantic, Economist, Guardian, Independent, New Yorker, Times, Washington Post etc. will provide strong basis for the Humanities and Social Science passages. We recommend reading at least one per day. This also keeps you abreast of contemporary events!
Science
Science articles are the trickiest to come by as many are behind pay walls or require a prohibitively high level of existing scientific knowledge. Nature and Science are the most reputable journals that occasionally publish open access articles. However, by building the reading skills from the suggested texts in the other areas, you greatly strengthen your aptitude for Science too!
Put this all into practice by booking a proctored practice test with A-List Education to sit a timed SAT under simulated test conditions, and receive tailored feedback and guidance by working with one of our esteemed private tutors.
