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What's better--doing some heavy duty reading of novels or memorizing vocab and doing the prep found in books?

I have prep books with huge word lists but it's a pain to memorize the words--I'd rather just read a good bit over the summer. What's more effective? The books I'd be reading would be difficult classical fiction and stuff like that.

By Altf4 (Altf4) on Sunday, June 13, 2004 - 11:15 pm: Edit

i do both, i have plenty of time and i'm devoting this summer to study since i'm only going on a small vacation in august.

i would think that reading is better though, since if ur reading something u enjoy, u will learn words as well.

By Newt (Newt) on Monday, June 14, 2004 - 12:20 am: Edit

Definately memorizing vocab. It's really not that hard if you are determined to do it.

I would recommend buying a book of the top SAT vocab words and transcribing them to notecards. Then practice with the notecards. This way, you only get the words that are likely to be on the test. I practiced for 2 weeks for about 30 minutes a night and memorized about 350 words from the book I bought. My vocab score went from 670 to 760!

The book I bought was "Hot Words for the SAT I"