english at uni pre reading

hi i want to study english at oxford in the future and want to acclerate my reading.
any english graduates or anyone studying the subject have any advice on what pre-reading i can do to stand out?

Hi!
That's a great goal to have, and starting sooner rather than later also shows some great initiative! My name's Jess and I have recently graduated with an English Literature degree at Lancaster University. My main advice to you would be looking on Oxford Uni's website and, more specifically, their modules for a typical English Literature course. They usually have 'set texts' or further reading presented on their website already, so definitely check there first!
Another place to check would actually be other university websites - it's great to have a university in mind, but it also wouldn't hurt to compare courses and see what other university's are looking for as a pre-reading list.
Depending on whether you are studying GCSEs or A Levels at the moment, JSTOR is an amazing website for free articles by writers surrounding texts, topics and themes - if you're not sure if you can access this, I would definitely ask one of your teachers if the school you attend has a login.
My final piece of advice would honestly be to read the things you actually enjoy - while academic papers and writings are great, personal statements to university's really stand out when you have a serious passion for whatever texts/genres you decide to read.
I hope this is okay, good luck with your readings and don't worry too much about it - once you've been accepted into a university there is plenty of time to learn the ropes and see which readings work for which course!
Jessica
Lancaster University Student Ambassador

Suggestions:
Read every book you can get your hands on. Remember than much of the canon is available free on Gutenberg.
Don't be limited by the A level syllabus.
Read as many C18 to C20 novels as you can, as much C16 to C20 poetry as you can, and as much Shakespeare as you can.
Have a look at this -
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/60328/lips-and-ledges-the-writings-of-john-carey
Maybe read some John Carey, Ros Ballaster, and Terry Eagleton.
You could perhaps check out Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf, and look up JRR Tolkien's essay Beowulf and the Critics (people sometimes forget that Tolkien's main job was being the Merton Professor of English at Oxford, not writing nonsense about hobbits).
You should be able to read Chaucer in the original, with a crib, but poems like Piers Plowman and Gawain And The Green Knight are trickier.
Tolkien's translation of Gawain is quite good. He never completed his translation of Beowulf (too busy writing nonsense about hobbits). There's a good recent film of Gawain, which captures the magical strangeness of the poem.
Here's The Wanderer in Anglo Saxon and in modern English -
https://www.tloneditions.com/Ezequiel_Vinao_The_Wanderer_translation.html