【大纪元2011年10月12日讯】大学升学考试SAT测验的3个科目中有一个是阅读理解，ACT考试4个科目中也考一个阅读。大专院校为什么那么重视阅读能力呢？
加州大学河滨校园英与系副教授布吉斯(John Briggs)，也是大学考试委员会(College Board) SAT阅读发展委员表示：“很大比例的大学新生难以了解大学程度学术文章的要旨。要透彻了文章，对他们来说很难。”好的阅读理解能力，是大学成功的必要因素。学生如果能在高中时期学好读书技巧，上了大学就能驾轻就熟，熬夜苦读的需要会大量减少，才能空出多余时间交友、参与活动、充实完整的大学经验。
最近一个ACT考试成绩的统计也发现到，只有大约一半的学生能胜任大学程度的阅读。2005年参加考试的学生中女性、亚裔与白人表现较好，但是他们当中也只有53、54、59%的学生有大学阅读水准，家庭年收入高于10万美元的学生，表现稍好，有70%的学生达到了所需的阅读能力。对于华人家庭来说没有英文文化与传统的优势，更加要听从专家的建议，培养孩子上图书馆查阅研究的习惯、多上书店浏览选购新书，如果能陪同孩子一起选读文章、讨论内容就更为理想。请尽量鼓励孩子多读书，不但有助阅读理解考试成绩，更能帮助未来大学学习的成功与进步。
一位高中老师说，每天阅读20分钟一年就能阅读2百万字，每年2百万也是加州教育单位对9-10年级学生的建议阅读量。然而，要读些什么呢？大学考试委员会开列了按照作者姓名字母顺序排列的101本书籍，提供所有想上大学的学生选择的参考http://www.collegeboard.com/student/plan/boost-your-skills/23628.html。
这项书单绝对不是考试必读清单，一些老师、作家们也只不过读了其中的10几20或30几本，一位爱书人与现代图书馆(Modern Library)提供的“100本最好小说”的清单相比较，表示大学委员会的书单更具多样性，包含了不同族裔与女性作家的著作，不是清一色白人作家的作品。一位读过书单中34本著作的老师说，阅读清单上这些书能为学生打下坚实的古典文字基础，更何况它们属于不同古典、学者形式的书籍，读起来很能享受其中趣味。
关心孩子阅读能力的家长，不妨建议孩子从以下101本书中开始选读 ( 按照书名字母顺序重排)。不同年纪、个性的孩子有不同的喜好，家长们有特别顾虑的也可以参与选择。学生可以请教图书馆员、老师或上户联网，例如亚马逊网上书店www.amazon.com预先了解每本著作的大概内容再选读。今天就开始每天20分钟的阅读计划吧！
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
