What are some good suggestions for books or materials I can use on the SAT essay section, other than Gone with the Wind?

href="http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/writing-sat-essay?pageId=practiceWritingEssay&tabValue=strategies">The
SAT College Board website declares that every student or instructor seems to
have a different opinion on how to earn a high score on the SAT
essay:

Some
people say you should write a strict five-paragraph essay... Some people say you should
read well-known books like The Great Gatsby or The Scarlet Letter and refer to them as
often as you can.

href="http://sat.collegeboard.org/practice/writing-sat-essay?pageId=practiceWritingEssay&tabValue=strategies">The
College Board further states that, "We want students to know that there are no
shortcuts to success on the SAT essay." The College Board advises that scoring highly is
not a matter of what books or materials you have read in the past, but rather how well
you can write in the present. What the SAT College Board is looking for in the essay
writing section is whether or not you can prove a point, required by a prompt, clearly,
concisely, and effectively. The College Board is testing your ability to express your
personal point of view in a logical, coherent, and grammatical fashion. They are more
concerned with whether or not you can build an argument, using clearly expressed
examples, and carry them out to the point that they actually prove your idea, then they
are concerned about what you have read. According to the College Board, the only real
thing you have to worry about reading is the entire directions to the writing
prompt.

However, that being said, since you will need to be
drawing on examples, of course expanding your mind with more literature will give you
more ideas with which to work with and use to illustrate your arguments. Shorter books
or short stories will especially be helpful because they are faster to read. One
excellent suggestion is a short novel by Henry James, Washington
Square. James is known for his very involved, very complex sentence
structure. He very frequently likes to make use of the periodic sentence, which builds
on a point using suspended syntax and climaxes in the final word. One example of his
sentences is:

readability="11">

He was a thoroughly honest man--honest in a
degree of which he had perhaps lacked the opportunity to give the complete measure; and,
putting aside the great good-nature of the circle in which he practised, which was
rather fond of boasting that it possessed the "brightest" doctor in the country, he
daily justified his claim to the talents attributed to him by the popular
voice.

Reading and
understanding complex sentences like this will not only give you ideas to illustrate
your points with, it will also fine-tune your sense and grasp of both grammar and
logic.

Reading books with strong themes will also increase
the number of insights you currently hold and give you more examples to use. The short
story "The Hunger Artist," by Franz Kafka, will give you themes to ponder, such as the
feeling of alienation, the desire for religion or spiritual understanding, and also
adapting to cultural changes. You can also consider reading Thomas Mann's celebrated
novella, Death in Venice, for a theme dealing with a literary
artist who separates himself from society for the sake of creating his
literature.