Looking for books to add to your reading list? Check out these 101 Great Books from the College Board to help boost your reading comprehension and verbal score/
Long ago, 101 great books from the College Board were mentioned and put on a list. We don’t know where that list is now on the College Board’s website, but the list–and the books–are great. The list was originally titled “101 Great Books Recommended for College-Bound Readers.” However, these books are great reads for age.
Why read 101 Great Books?
Before its current iteration, parts of the SAT were like a vocabulary test. It was assumed that if you read lots of books, you would have a good vocabulary. At the very least, you would be a strong reader with good reading comprehension. Although the SAT has changed, being a good reader is still important because good readers:
- Understand the reading passages in section 1
- Score higher in section 1
- Tend to be natural editors, which means they see the grammar and editing mistakes in writing section 2
- Score higher in section 2
- Understand the word problems in section 3 (even if they can’t do the math)
- Understand the words problems in section 4 (including those super long setups for simple graph questions)
Why 101? It’s just one of those popular numbers, like 101 dalmatians.
101 Great Books from College Board
The list is organized by author’s last name. Check below for the 5 books according to different categories.
- Beowulf
- Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
- Agee, James – A Death in the Family
- Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
- Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
- Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
- Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
- Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
- Camus, Albert – The Stranger
- Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
- Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
- Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
- Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
- Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
- Dante – Inferno
- de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
- Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
- Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
- Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
- Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
- Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
- Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
- Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
- Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
- Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
- Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
- Ford, Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
- Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
- Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
- Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
- Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
- Homer – The Iliad
- Homer – The Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
- Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
- James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
- James, Henry – The Turn of the Screw
- Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
- Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
- Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
- Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
- London, Jack – The Call of the Wild
- Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
- Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
- Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
- Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
- Morrison, Toni – Beloved
- O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
- O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
- Orwell, George – Animal Farm
- Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
- Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
- Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
- Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
- Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
- Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
- Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
- Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
- Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
- Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
- Macbeth
- Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
- Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
- Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
- Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Sophocles – Antigone
- Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
- Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
- Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
- Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
- Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
- Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
- Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Voltaire – Candide
- Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
- Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
- Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
- Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
- Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
- Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
- Wright, Richard – Native Son
Here’s our disclaimer: These books are all classics, but some of them are pretty hardcore. Be sure to read the plot summary of the book before you start reading. Otherwise, your delicate sensibilities may be offended.
5 Easiest Books to Read
The Grapes of Wrath
Lord of the Flies
A Farewell to Arms
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye
5 “Modern” Books by Women Authors
The Awakening
The Bell Jar
The Woman Warrior
To the Lighthouse
A Good Man is Hard to Find
5 Books by African-American Authors
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Invisible Man
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Beloved
The Color Purple
Where to Find 101 Great Books from College Board in Dubai
If you love the feel of a book in your hand, try these places in Dubai for the 101 great books from the College Board:
- Your school library
- The Old Library (it’s only AED 200 to be a member for the year and most of these books are there)
Own a Kindle or don’t mind e-books?
Check out pdfdrive.com to search for many of the books that are in the public domain. If you have a Kindle, be sure to download the MOBI format so that the book renders properly on your device.
