GRE Verbal Preparation - Best GRE Books

Verbal Book recommendations for GRE

1. Barrons GRE ( 18th edition is the latest)
If you want to buy just one book for your GRE preparation this is the one !Plus, it is priced at less than 12 USD at amazon.So, look no further.

Pros -
a. It has the 4000 words well organised into 50 wordlists . Examples are provided for each word. If you are aiming for a high score this wordlist is indispensible.
b. 333 high frequency words.
c. The verbal section is among the best. [/list]
Cons -
a. Not quite sufficient for Math preparation. The basics are covered, but not sufficient practice and not many challenging questions.



2. Nova's GRE Prep Course

Pros -
a. Lots of practice questions for verbal and Maths.
b. Very detailed AWA section.
c. Has 4000+ of GRE words. Downside is that only a 1 word meaning is given (without examples). Also includes high frequency words.

Cons -
The book is accompanied by a CD which is a big disappointment compared to the high standard of the book. But still, the book itself is worth the price.




3. Norman Lewis - Word Power Made Easy

The toughest part of GRE preparation is building the vocabulary and this book works wonders. This book is based on etymology (root words) and actually makes learning new words and interesting thing to do.
For me, the biggest advantage I see is that when I learned words by understanding the roots, I was able to retain them much better than those I just tried to memorize otherwise.

As a matter of fact, it is not a GRE specific book, but is highly recommended because most of the words covered in this is part of the GRE wordlists.It is priced at less than 7 USD ( may be even lesser ) and I assure that you wont regret buying this.





4. Kaplan GRE Premier

Overall good preparation for GRE.
One of the noteworthy things is that Kaplan CD comes with a lot of practice and 5 full length GRE exams which are pretty close to the real one.







5.Cracking the GRE with DVD, 2011 Edition

Pros -
This is a book lot of GRE candidates absolutely love. Check out the amazon reviews.
More than anything, it has the most simple presentation and makes it appear that GRE is totally do-able.

Cons -
May not be enough for a 1200+ score.



6.Gre: Practicing to Take the General Test : Big Book 1995 ed.

Pros -
1.This book is the ultimate practice for GRE verbal. Excellent practice for verbal.
2.There are 54 question sets in the old paper based format. The difficulty level is comparable to actual GRE.
3. Real GRE retired questions
4. Especially useful for the reading comprehension section.
Cons -
1. Out of print now.
2. The used copies may be available at amazon, ebay etc. But are extremely expensive.

Bottom line, if you can find this book, that is all you need for GRE verbal practice.There is a GRE Math bigbook which is again hard to find. But that is totally outdated with a different question pattern - not worth it.




7.GRE: Practicing to Take the General Test 10th Edition

Pros -
1. The only material available in market that has real retired GRE questions.
2. Contains 6 full length paper based exams.
3. Good for verbal practice and real-GRE like verbal questions.
4. Priced at less than 12 USD a copy, pretty inexpensive
5. Has the Mathrev pdf, which is a good Math refresher.This includes some good points that people tend to overlook. However, this is available for free download at ETS site.

Cons -
1. This is not an independant guide. It helps only as a question bank.
2. Out of the 6 exams, only one has detailed explainations for answers
3. Maths question pattern is outdated. It follows the very old pattern where 30 questions needed to be answered in 30 minutes. The current pattern has 28 questions and is 45 minutes long.

Overall, since the bigbook is out of print, this is the next best option for access to real GRE verbal questions.

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