Reading Nonfiction to Improve GRE® Reading Comprehension

Co-authored with Dave Goldstein

If you’ve been told to “read more” as GRE advice, you’ve probably found it unsatisfying. It’s vague, it’s slow, and it doesn’t feel like studying. It’s also the single most reliable thing we know of for raising a verbal score. 

On the GRE, reading more pays off quite a bit: your reading ability gets better for Reading Comprehension, where you’re tracking an author’s argument; and on the vocabulary questions, you’ll get better at understanding the meaning of a word through context. Here’s how to build your reading ability through reading non-fiction.

How Much Reading Actually Moves the Needle?

The research here is more encouraging than you might expect. Studies on reading growth suggest that as little as 15 minutes a day produces measurable improvement, and that returns tend to max out at 30 minutes a day.

The catch is that these gains accumulate slowly. Reading comprehension improves over months and years, not over a weekend, which means a marathon session the week before your test won’t do much for you. If your reading skills are the thing standing between you and your target score, build 30 minutes a day into your schedule now and treat it as a long-term investment rather than a quick fix.

How Hard Should Your Reading Be?

Harder than feels comfortable, is the short and sweet answer.

Researchers disagree about the precise amount of difficulty. Some point to the “frustration level,” where you recognize around 85% of the words on the page. Others favor an “instructional level” closer to 93-97% recognition. Either way, the conclusion is the same: for best results, pick material where you don’t understand every word on the page.

If you’re gliding through an article without friction, pick something more difficult. Ideally, your reading material makes you slow down – discomfort means you’re doing it right.

Why Nonfiction Suits GRE Prep

GRE Reading Comprehension passages are nonfiction, so practicing with nonfiction is the closest thing to rehearsal you can get outside official material. If certain subjects make your heart sink when they appear in a passage, whether that’s biology, economics, or art criticism, reading in those areas is a direct way to take the edge off.

Nonfiction also lends itself to the approach we recommend in our GRE Reading Comprehension guide. As you read, pause at the end of each paragraph and ask two questions: why did the author write this, and how does it connect to what came before? That habit helps immensely when it comes to Reading Comprehension.

Reading Also Trains You for Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence

The GRE asks for something many other standardized exams don’t. About half of the verbal section is Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence, where you’re handed a sentence with a blank, a list of words to fill that blank, and you need to figure out what word belongs in the blank.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who will know the meaning of every word they see on the GRE. It’s nearly inevitable that you’ll run into words you don’t know. Here’s the good news: you don’t really need to know what every word means. You just need to be able to figure its meaning out through context.

This is where daily reading starts to pay off, as long as you do one thing: when you hit a word you don’t know, don’t look it up right away. Work out what it probably means from the sentence around it, make your best guess, jot it down, and keep reading. At the end of your session, look up the words you flagged and see how you did.

Nonfiction gives you especially good practice here, because unfamiliar words abound in domains outside of your own. Authors will usually define a concept, draw a contrast, or start building toward a claim, and those logical relationships are the same clues that Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence questions ask you to use. Working out what a difficult word means from the paragraph surrounding it in a science article is close to the same operation as working out which word belongs in a GRE blank.

Please don’t look up the word right away! Discerning meaning by using context is the whole point of reading harder material. If you look up a word immediately, you’re training yourself to memorize and not reason. We go into further detail on why memorizing word lists won’t save you here.

For the method itself, see our guides to Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence.

Which Nonfiction Books Should I Read?

Anything challenging will do the job, so don’t agonize over the choice. That said, here are four we’d point a GRE student toward:

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky. Sapolsky examines a single human action, then keeps rewinding: what happened in the brain one second before, the hours before, the years before, and finally, across evolutionary time. This book gives you 700 pages of practice at holding an argument together, while the frame keeps shifting.

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. The research behind this book contributed to Acemoglu’s 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s an ideal read for training GRE Reading Comprehension, where you’re constantly asked what evidence a claim rests on, and whether that claim holds.

The World According to Color by James Fox. Each chapter takes one color and follows it through art history, chemistry, linguistics, and myth. If unfamiliar subject matter is what throws you on the GRE, this book asks you to change registers every few pages, making for some stellar Reading Comprehension practice.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. Pollan traces four meals from soil to plate, and turns the question of what to have for dinner into something that’s really quite gripping. Narrative journalism carrying an argument underneath allows for excellent GRE practice – see if you can pick apart the argument and evidence Pollan presents as you read along.

Shorter Reading for Busy Weeks

If a book feels like too much commitment alongside everything else, these work well for quicker reads:

• The Electric Typewriter: 150 articles that will make you think
• The Marginalian: A collection of articles focused on art, philosophy, and literature
• Scientific American: A science magazine, if that wasn’t immediately apparent
• The Economist: A periodical focused on business and current events
• The New Yorker: A monthly magazine chock full of cultural essays.
• Quanta Magazine: A magazine focused on math and science.
• Noema Magazine: Longform journalism around a wide swath of topics.

What About Fiction?

Fiction helps too, because novelists use language in ways that nonfiction writers don’t. The pull of a story can be far more engaging too, which helps manage the burnout that can creep in during prep. Our guide to reading fiction for the GRE makes that case.