Should you read novels to improve your GRE verbal section? Don’t if you plan to give the GRE within the next 2 to 3 months, but if you spend hours every day just staring at a wall, better to read something. However, if you plan to sit the GRE after at least six months, reading novels can be beneficial.

If you are short on time, then cracking flashcards will improve your score much more than reading novels. I know flashcards are annoying, but even if you spend half the time on flashcards as you would on reading books, your score will improve quickly in the shorter run. You will have to read a lot to come across those words that occur on the GRE. Plus, GRE deliberately uses obscure words so that most people don’t know them. Even for GRE reading passages, the novels are often long, while reading passages much shorter. Books do not ask you questions, but the GRE passages questions can be confusing. For training reading comprehension in less than three months, I recommend that you do hundreds of practice questions repeatedly.

However, I highly recommend novels and books to give the GRE after about six months to a year. Reading good quality GRE type novels will help you improve your contextual understanding and usage of GRE words and also your reading speed and comprehension gradually and permanently. The vocabulary will appear in the context of a continuous story in a novel that you will enjoy and retain for a longer time.

These novels will help you read and practice the convoluted GRE writing style. Their focus is on hard sentence structures and complex organization of ideas. The language of these novels is consistent with the GRE language. They also contain a lot of GRE words that are used in all the possible ways that the GRE can use. Their topics range from sciences to music, arts, and literature – GRE’s favorite subjects. If you read them with concentration and a sound mind, they will train your mind for complex GRE texts.

I have arranged these books in order of importance, beginning with the best ones.

Click on the titles to find out more about each Novel.

1. The Best American Essays (Essays)
2. The Sparrow by Maria Dora Russell (Science Fiction)
3. How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen (Fiction)
4. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Fiction)
5. The Art of Manliness – Manvotionals – Timeless Wisdom and Advice on Living the 7 Manly Virtues by Brett McKay (Self-help book)
6. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (Domestic Fiction)
7. A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Autobiography, Memoir)
8. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Romance, Historical Fiction)
9. Shogun by James Clavell (Historical Fiction)
10. Guns Germs and Steel (Non-Fiction)
11. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Biography, Travel literature, Philosophical fiction, Autobiographical novel)
12. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tragedy, Historical Fiction)
13. Daisy Miller by Henry James (Fiction, Novella)
14. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Erotic literature, Fiction, Tragicomedy)
15. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Historical Fiction)
16. Men without women by Earnest Hemingway (Short story, Adventure fiction, Autobiographical novel)

17. Wild Swans by Jung Chang
    (Biography)

     

    Some Bonus Books that you can read as well

18. The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal by Desmond Morris
19. The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh (Non-Fiction)
20. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (Science Fiction)