I’m a female in 10th grade and have just taken the EOY Reading Inventory, and it turns out the my Lexile score went down from 1409 to 1398 from the BOY test. I love reading, but perhaps only mostly reading fanfiction and graphic novels isn’t very good for expanding my vocabulary. I also thought I would have improved by now because people consider me quite smart in other areas of expertise, so I’m pretty bummed.
I’ll list some of my interests:
* Murder mysteries
* Psychological thrillers
* Romance
* Tragedy
* Comedy, but not overly-comedic
* I prefer a female protagonist
* Maybe some classics would be nice, something that people would recognize if I brought it up.
That’s all, thank you for reading, any and all help is appreciated!
by sourcoated
2 Comments
You can go to [lexile.com](https://hub.lexile.com/find-a-book/search) and enter your score. The app will suggest books at your level and books that will stretch your reading growth. You can filter the results by any of the categories you mentioned.
Dorothy L Sayers was writing mysteries in the 1920s and 1930s and had no patience for writing down to her audience (her publisher had to arm twist her into providing an English translation for a letter in French in *Clouds of Witness*). Her Lord Peter Wimsey books are still classics today.
Her first book is *Whose Body?* Her best book, IMO, is *Murder Must Advertise*.
For fun Victorian Melodrama pastiche with a female protagonist, check out the Amelia Peabody books by Elizabeth Peters. They are humerous mysteries with some romance (or at least Amelia wants there to be romance!) set mostly in Egypt with lots of archeology (Peters was an Egyptologist so the archeological bits are pretty accurate). The first book, which is a romance and a mystery, is *Crocodile on the Sandbank*. Her best book, IMO, is *He Shall Thunder in the Sky* but I wouldn’t recommend reading it early in the series as it takes place when her son Ramses is an adult and during WWI.