If you’re studying for the SAT or ACT and are looking for resources to help you prepare for the reading portions, the following list is intended to reflect the types of authors and works tested on these exams.
Newspapers and Magazines
Harvard Business Review (limited free articles)
The New Yorker (limited free articles)
Non-Fiction Authors: Adam Grant, Brian Greene, Daniel Kahneman, Alan Lightman, Leonard Mlodinow, Lisa Randall, Oliver Sacks
You can also browse Arts & Letters Daily for links to a wide range of publications in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.
In addition, I recommend university alumni magazines, many of which are accessible online to the general public. (I’m including those of top schools below since they reliably contain a lot of SAT/ACT-level content but you can also google any university name + magazine and see what’s available for a given school.)
In addition to having a variety of interesting, well-written articles on many topics likely to crop up on various standardized tests, these publications help you get a sense of different schools’ cultures as well as what sort of paths their graduates take.
Consider it double duty: you can do test prep and conduct your college search simultaneously. You might even be able to discuss something you read about in your “why this college” essay.
Fiction
Classic Authors: Jane Austen, Ann Brontë, Willa Cather, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, E.M. Forster
Contemporary Authors: Isabel Allende, Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Michael Chabon, Louise Erdrich, Oscar Hijuelos, Jamaica Kincaid, Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan
SAT Historical Documents
50 Core Documents: Teaching American History
Important Documents of the Revolutionary Era
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony