Reading Fiction to Improve GRE® Reading Comprehension

Co-authored with Dave Goldstein

(Editor’s note: Dave and Dana are both aspiring novelists, in addition to being amazing GRE tutors. So now that they’re blushing, I’d recommend reading whichever novels they encourage you to read. — CB.)

Most people preparing for the GRE reach for nonfiction to practice their reading ability, and that’s a reasonable instinct. GRE passages are nonfiction, so nonfiction feels like the closer match.

In this article, we’d like to make a case for some fiction reading alongside your nonfiction reading. Why, you may ask? Because fiction happens to build a specific skill the GRE asks for: the ability to stay engaged with difficult prose for long periods – an absolutely crucial skill on the GRE, which is chock full of difficult, long passages.

What Fiction Does to Your Reading

In a study run at the University of British Columbia and UC Santa Barbara, participants who read absurdist fiction went on to perform better at detecting patterns in a subsequent test, than a control group who read something more conventional. The researchers attributed this result to “meaning threat”: when a story refuses to behave the way you expect, your brain works harder to find coherence, and that heightened searching carries over into whatever you do next.

Separately, reading novels appears to increase connectivity in the language regions of the brain, which researchers attribute to the way a story places you inside someone else’s experience.

Neither of these is a shortcut to a higher score, but both point at something we see constantly in tutoring: students lose points on GRE verbal not because they can’t understand a passage, but because their attention slips halfway through it. Fiction is unusually good at training you to hold your attention on difficult sentences, which makes it good training for a section that punishes drifting.

Fiction and the GRE’s Vocabulary Questions

There’s one more reason fiction earns a place in GRE prep specifically, and it has to do with a question type you won’t find on most other exams.

About half of GRE verbal is Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence: a sentence with a blank, and a set of words that might fill it. However much you read beforehand, you’ll encounter unfamiliar words on test day. Said another way: recognition won’t save you, but being comfortable discerning the meaning of a word through context will.

Fiction trains that in a way nonfiction doesn’t quite manage, for two reasons.

The first is that novelists reach for unusual words on purpose. A writer describing someone’s mood will choose the one word carrying the exact shade of emotion they’re looking for, and as the reader, you’ll intuit what that word means from everything else the scene has told you about that character.

The second is momentum. You want to know what happens next, so you keep reading instead of stopping to look things up.

Combined, these two factors build your ability to put together meaning through context – exactly the skill the GRE is testing you on.

For more on what the GRE is truly testing you on in the Verbal section, visit our guides to Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence.

A Daily Habit, Not a Quick Fix

As we cover in our nonfiction reading guide, the benefits of reading accumulate over months. That means reading to improve your ability only pays off if you keep the habit, and if you dread reading every day, it’s unlikely you’ll stick with it over weeks or months.

So if a dense essay collection ends up gathering dust on your desk, but a novel would have kept you engaged, pick the novel instead.

Our Fiction Recommendations for GRE Students

While any novel that’s a little challenging will do for this purpose, here’s our recommended reading list to get you started.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: In the running for the funniest book of the 20th century, Catch-22 is also riddled with the kinds of knotty logical paradoxes that will hone your GRE skills as you laugh at the grotesquerie of human folly.

The Trial by Franz Kafka: In a study conducted at the University of British Columbia, participants who read Kafka performed significantly better on a subsequent logic test than a control group that read a more conventional linear narrative. We’ll interpret that as evidence of the brain-enhancing effects of reading truly inventive fiction.

Babel by R.F. Kuang: While we won’t spoil the premise, this whole novel is an argument about etymology and precision, complete with footnotes. If you want a book that makes you pay attention to the nuance of a word, this is the one.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: The unreliable narrator of this book means you spend the duration of the book assembling the truth from a limited account, inferring what the narrator can’t tell you. Think of it as Text Completion, in novel form. It’s also only 250 pages long, making it the least demanding book on this list.

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin: An outstanding choice for those looking to practice identifying meaning through context, Le Guin never stops to explain the terms she invents in this book. As the reader, it’s your job to work out the concepts that are defined nowhere but found everywhere, while keeping up the constantly-changing registers between reports, myths, and field notes.

The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu: If a 700-page novel feels impossible alongside everything else you’re doing, short stories might be the right fit for you. Liu is a translator by trade, and it shows in his own original works: these stories circle questions of language, memory, and what survives being carried between cultures. The range across genres also means you’re never settling into one style, much like the GRE itself.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: Tartt writes long, elaborate, subordinate-clause-heavy sentences that you read through once… then circle back and reread again. This is what makes her writing both masterful and quite useful for the GRE, where paying attention to every word is a vital skill. While this is a 700-page literary mountain, you don’t necessarily have to finish it to get the practice you’re looking for on the GRE.