8 books to read during GRE prep

Looking to improve your GRE Verbal score? Boost your comprehension of tough vocabulary, complex sentence
structure, context clues and topsy-turvy analytical reasoning by reading these long form narratives—fiction and
non-fiction alike!

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1) The Best American Essays
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Come for the stellar structural organization of key ideas and stay for the complex sentences that characterize
this popular essay series. Any test taker can benefit from this sophisticated level of analytical thinking,
articulated in the types of twisty sentences you’ll find peppered throughout the GRE Verbal Section. These
essays are also good for building GRE vocab—you’ll find many a flashcard word contextually defined in their
pages.
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2) The Wizard of Oz Vocabulary Builder by Frank L. Baum and Mark Phillips
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The best vocabulary builder out there, in my opinion. This book pairs the original text of Frank L. Baum’s The
Wizard of Oz (which is, incidentally, a lot scarier than the kids' version) with easy to understand definitions of the
difficult vocabulary used in the story and hilarious illustrative sentences. Building your vocabulary is shockingly
easy when you learn by combining definition, sample usage, and context clues into an engaging narrative!
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3) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
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Tackle tough ideas in this dystopian classic, which integrates advanced vocabulary into an engrossing and
accessible vision of the future. Not only is this a great GRE read, it’s a great read in general--not to be missed by
any human, anywhere.
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4) Any selection from P. G. Wodehouse’s Collected Works
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P.G. Wodehouse’s dry humor makes for memorable lessons in word comprehension and difficult sentence
structure. For those who find humor helps in remembering definitions or understanding academic language,
well—I recommend you ask Jeeves.
 5) The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
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You’ll find this sci-fi novel and its sequel, Children of God, on every GRE reading list out there. Vocabulary,
philosophical inquiry, intellectual speculation, complex compound sentences—these two books have ‘em all.
They themselves read like GRE reading comprehension passages, in the best possible way.
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6) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov is a master of both the convoluted sentence and the convoluted mind in this classic portrait of
literature’s most famous pedophile. Don’t let the taboo scare you off, the beauty of this book shines through the
slippery intellectualism of its narrator, articulated in windy prose with ten-dollar words.
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7) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert
M. Pirsig
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8) Freedom and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
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Everyone’s reading him, so you can improve your cultural capital, or the topics you’re ready to discuss at cocktail
parties, while studying for the GRE! Welcome to the sprawling American epic chronicling generations of
dysfunction, and get engrossed in character portraits painted with GRE vocabulary, and using GRE-style
sentence structure.
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For those of you with less than three months before your official GRE date, reading all or even many of these
lengthy books may not be feasible or the best use of your time. If you’re in a crunch, try reading magazines
like The New Yorker, National Geographic or The Economist to get acquainted with the linguistic formalism
you'll encounter on the GRE.