I'm a native English speaker, am university educated, have been reading fiction for as long as I can remember, and would consider myself to have a reasonably extensive vocabulary, yet I suffer from the same issue: encountering words in fiction that I have never previously been exposed to. You're always going to come up against it no matter how well prepared you are.

I'll offer my tips for both reading and writing new words within the English language, as they generally help me a lot.

Reading

I'm not sure if this is an obvious thing that everyone does or if it's more uncommon, so I apologize if it seems patronizing.

If I come across an unfamiliar word in a book, I will simply read the rest of the sentence or paragraph without knowing what the word means. 9 times out of 10 I find that simply trying to understand the word in context is enough to give me a fairly good idea of what the word means.

For example:

He made to answer the door, but found the task rather arduous. He was forced to sidle around his colleague's desk of Brobdingnagian proportions in order to reach the far side of the room.

Let's say I didn't know the meaning of the words arduous or Brobdingnagian, and had read this passage. The first thing that I would assume is that Brobdingnagian had something to do with size, due to it being an adjective of the word proportions.

Based on the passage, however, it's unlikely to mean small, because if he had to make his way around a small desk it would not be worthy of it's own sentence, and it would be a pointless description, therefore I can infer that Brobdingnagian means large.

Now the word arduous makes more sense, and is likely to mean something along the lines of slow, difficult or painful. There's no way I can possibly know which from this extract, but they all give a similar idea as to what the task was like and how it was completed, so it doesn't really matter.

However the next time I encounter the word in my reading I will know that it means something along these lines, and further readings of the word in different situations will build my understanding of it over time.

Writing

You will develop your own writing style, and as others here have suggested it is best to read things that are similar to the way you want to write. However, the best bit of advice that I can give when trying to write without being "too dry" is to try to write accurately.

When reading books, I've found that the best things I read aren't the passages that are the most colorful, or that use the most creative descriptions, but those are the most accurate.

An author could describe someone as being as warm and affectionate as a box of kittens, yet with the disposition that they wouldn't harm a butterfly, but sometimes the word gentle would suffice. There are good things that are infinitely wonderful, ever so subtly satisfying, or so epic and grandiose as to bring grown adults to tears as they marvel in the shadow of its beauty, but sometimes they're just good.

There are some good points here about using the strength of words to color your descriptions. It's not directly related, but looks at how different words are more emotive than others.

So it all comes back to choosing the most accurate words for the best descriptions. Sometimes they will involve delving into the dictionary for the correct descriptive language, but often the simple things are better.

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