A note about reading: What type of books should a-g students read? Only books written at or above a student' s reading level will truly develop a student' s academic or intellectual capacity. Challenging books feature elevated vocabulary, sophisticated sentence structure, and complex ideas. Of course, this doesn' t mean that you should never read easier books just for fun; we do that all the time. However, reading a combination of "easy" books and more challenging books is the best way to sustain your interest and improve your abilities.
The College Board: 101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers
Author, Title, Lexile
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart 890
Agee, James A Death in the Family 1020
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain 1030
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March n/a
Brontë, Charlotte Jane Eyre 890
Brontë, Emily Wuthering Heights 880
Camus, Albert The Stranger 880
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop 1150
Chopin, Kate The Awakening 960
Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans 1350
de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote 1500
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe 1070
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities 1130
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 990
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 1080
Dreiser, Theodore An American Tragedy 1240
Dumas, Alexandre The Three Musketeers 960
Eliot, George The Mill on the Floss 1240
Ellison, Ralph Invisible Man 950
Faulkner, William As I Lay Dying 870
Faulkner, William The Sound and the Fury 870
Fielding, Henry Tom Jones 1360
Flaubert, Gustave Madame Bovary 1030
Ford, Ford Madox The Good Soldier 1040
Hardy, Thomas Tess of the d' Urbervilles 1160
Hawthorne, Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter 1340
Heller, Joseph Catch 22 1140
Hemingway, Ernest A Farewell to Arms 730
Hugo, Victor The Hunchback of Notre Dame 1340
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World 870
James, Henry The Portrait of a Lady 1020
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw 1140
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1120
Kingston, Maxine Hong The Woman Warrior 880
Lewis, Sinclair Babbitt 1110
London, Jack The Call of the Wild 1120
Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain 1350
Marquez, Gabriel García One Hundred Years of Solitude 1410
Melville, Herman Moby Dick 1200
O' Connor, Flannery A Good Man is Hard to Find n/a
Pasternak, Boris Doctor Zhivago 1010
Plath, Sylvia The Bell Jar 1140
Proust, Marcel Swann' s Way n/a
Remarque, Erich Maria All Quiet on the Western Front 830
Roth, Henry Call It Sleep n/a
Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony 890
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 900
Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath 680
Stevenson, Robert Louis Treasure Island 1070
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom' s Cabin 1050
Swift, Jonathan Gulliver' s Travels 1210
Thackeray, William Vanity Fair 1270
Thoreau, Henry David Walden 1340
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace 1240
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons n/a
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 990
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five 850
Walker, Alice The Color Purple 670
Wharton, Edith The House of Mirth 1230
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray 920
Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse 1030
Wright, Richard Native Son 700
Franklin, Benjamin Autobiography 1370
X, Malcolm The Autobiography of Malcolm X 1120