【大紀元2011年10月12日訊】大學升學考試SAT測驗的3個科目中有一個是閱讀理解，ACT考試4個科目中也考一個閱讀。大專院校為甚麼那麼重視閱讀能力呢？
加州大學河濱校園英與系副教授布吉斯(John Briggs)，也是大學考試委員會(College Board) SAT閱讀發展委員表示：「很大比例的大學新生難以了解大學程度學術文章的要旨。要透徹了文章，對他們來說很難。」好的閱讀理解能力，是大學成功的必要因素。學生如果能在高中時期學好讀書技巧，上了大學就能駕輕就熟，熬夜苦讀的需要會大量減少，才能空出多餘時間交友、參與活動、充實完整的大學經驗。
最近一個ACT考試成績的統計也發現到，只有大約一半的學生能勝任大學程度的閱讀。2005年參加考試的學生中女性、亞裔與白人表現較好，但是他們當中也只有53、54、59%的學生有大學閱讀水準，家庭年收入高於10萬美元的學生，表現稍好，有70%的學生達到了所需的閱讀能力。對於華人家庭來說沒有英文文化與傳統的優勢，更加要聽從專家的建議，培養孩子上圖書館查閱研究的習慣、多上書店瀏覽選購新書，如果能陪同孩子一起選讀文章、討論內容就更為理想。請盡量鼓勵孩子多讀書，不但有助閱讀理解考試成績，更能幫助未來大學學習的成功與進步。
一位高中老師說，每天閱讀20分鐘一年就能閱讀2百萬字，每年2百萬也是加州教育單位對9-10年級學生的建議閱讀量。然而，要讀些甚麼呢？大學考試委員會開列了按照作者姓名字母順序排列的101本書籍，提供所有想上大學的學生選擇的參考http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23628.html。
這項書單絕對不是考試必讀清單，一些老師、作家們也只不過讀了其中的10幾20或30幾本，一位愛書人與現代圖書館(Modern Library)提供的「100本最好小說」的清單相比較，表示大學委員會的書單更具多樣性，包含了不同族裔與女性作家的著作，不是清一色白人作家的作品。一位讀過書單中34本著作的老師說，閱讀清單上這些書能為學生打下堅實的古典文字基礎，更何況它們屬於不同古典、學者形式的書籍，讀起來很能享受其中趣味。
關心孩子閱讀能力的家長，不妨建議孩子從以下101本書中開始選讀 ( 按照書名字母順序重排)。不同年紀、個性的孩子有不同的喜好，家長們有特別顧慮的也可以參與選擇。學生可以請教圖書館員、老師或上戶聯網，例如亞馬遜網上書店www.amazon.com預先了解每本著作的大概內容再選讀。今天就開始每天20分鐘的閱讀計劃吧！
1. A Death in the Family by James Agee
2. A Doll』s House by Henrik Ibsen
3. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
4. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O』Connor
5. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
6. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
7. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
8. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
9. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
10. Animal Farm by George Orwell
11. Antigone by Sophocles
12. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
13. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
14. Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
15. Beloved by Toni Morrison
16. Beowulf
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
18. Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
19. Candide by Voltaire
20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
21. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
22. Collected Stories by Eudora Welty
23. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
24. Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand
25. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
26. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
27. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
28. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
29. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
30. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
31. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
32. Gulliver』s Travels by Jonathan Swift
33. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
34. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
35. Inferno by Dante
36. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
37. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
38. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
39. Long Day』s Journey into Night by Eugene O』Neill
40. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
41. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
42. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
43. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
44. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
45. Native Son by Richard Wright
46. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
47. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
48. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
49. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
50. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
51. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
52. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
53. Selected Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
54. Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe
55. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
56. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
57. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
58. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
59. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
60. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
61. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
62. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
63. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
64. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
65. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov
66. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
67. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
68. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
69. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
70. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
71. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
72. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
73. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
74. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
75. The Iliad by Homer
76. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
77. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
78. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
79. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
80. The Odyssey by Homer
81. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
82. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
83. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
84. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
85. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
86. The Stranger by Albert Camus
87. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
88. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
89. The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
90. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
91. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
92. To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
93. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
94. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
95. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
96. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
97. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray
98. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
99. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
100. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
101. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
