Reading Week
Next week is 'Reading Week' on the campus close by. We used to call such a week, 'Slack Week' and there was only one of them, which came around this time of year. Now there is also one in the fall, which surely means that the students these days are better read than we slackers were.
There is no reason why they should have all the fun, so I am offering a relevant reading list which will last you over the many 'Reading Weeks' yet to come. It is relevant in that all of the books relate to campuses of one sort or another and, although they are works of fiction, they may enlighten us about what is really going on in the shadows of the ivory towers.
This list comes, indirectly from this article: “There’s Always Been Trouble in ‘The Groves of Academe’: How a 1950s Novel Explains the Crisis in Higher Education,” A.O. Scott, The New York Times, Jan. 31, 2024. (Careful readers of MM will know that the "Groves" reference can be connected directly to that campus close by.) These two snippets from it should encourage you to read the entire article and are likely to increase your interest in the list that follows:
Every squawking buzzard in American public life — every quarrel about race, class, sex, foreign policy, pronoun usage — takes wing from or comes home to roost on campus…
- and especially this one:
I would go so far as to claim that the modern university campus — in actuality one of the most systematically humorless habitats ever devised by human beings — is the only reliably funny place in contemporary literature.
In the article there is a link to the list that follows. A full reference is provided and you should have a look at it. The author offers useful brief descriptions which can help you select from the sixty. For example, #4 consists of "277 pages of absolute zingers," #16 is"Not strictly a campus novel," and #39 is worth a look since, "Any book that includes skinny dipping in Walden Pond is literary catnip."
The source: "The 60 Best Campus Novels from the Last 100 Years From Evelyn Waugh to Rebecca Makkai," Emily Temple, Literary Hub, Nov. 2, 2022. The list is basically in chronological order, so the most recently published is the last one. Of course, as usual, additional essential information is found at the end.
1. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928).
2. Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935)
3. Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952)
4. Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution (1954)
5.Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954)
6.Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957)
7.John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959)
8.Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin (1964)
9.John Williams, Stoner (1965)
10.Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (1966)
11.Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (1974)
12.David Lodge, The Campus Trilogy (1975; 1984; 1988)
13. Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline (1980)
14.Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (1987)
15.Fleur Jaeggy, tr. Tim Parks, Sweet Days of Discipline (1989; translation 1993)
16.A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (1990)
17.Javier Marías, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, All Souls (1992)
18. Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992)
19.Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (1993)
20.Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
21.Jane Smiley, Moo (1995)
22.Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys (1995)
23.James Hynes, Publish and Perish: Three Tales of Tenure and Terror (1997)
24.Richard Russo, Straight Man (1997)
25.Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000)
26.Denis Johnson, The Name of the World (2000)
27.Tobias Wolff, Old School (2003)
28.Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005)
29.Curtis Sittenfeld, Prep (2005)
30.Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005)
31.Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006)
32.Jean Hanff Korelitz, Admission (2009)
33.Paul Murray, Skippy Dies (2010)
34.Lan Samantha Chang, All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (2010)
35.Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding (2011)
36.Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (2011)
37.Pamela Erens, The Virgins (2013)
38.Susan Choi, My Education (2013)
39.André Aciman, Harvard Square (2013)
40.Christopher J. Yates, Black Chalk (2013)
41.Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members (2014)
42.Tana French, The Secret Place (2014)
43.Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017)
44.Weike Wang, Chemistry (2017)
45.R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries (2018)
46.Jordy Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox (2018)
47.Sally Rooney, Normal People (2018)
48.Juliet Lapidos, Talent (2019)
49.Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House (2019)
50.Mona Awad, Bunny (2019)
51.Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House (2020)
52.Kate Weinberg, The Truants (2020)
53.Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020)
54.Emily M. Danforth, Plain Bad Heroines (2020)
55.Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind (2021)
56.Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (2021)
57.Lee Cole, Groundskeeping (2022)
58.Julia May Jonas, Vladimir (2022)
59.Elaine Hsieh Chou, Disorientation (2022)
60.Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions For You (2023)
Other stuff:
For another list see: "9 Best Campus Novels (and One Memoir)," Emily Layden, Publishers Weekly, Feb. 17, 2021 (6 of them are not on the above list.) Of course there is also Wikiwands, "Campus Novel." "Campus novels exploit the fictional possibilities created by a closed environment of the university, with idiosyncratic characters inhabiting unambiguous hierarchies."
If you don't read, watch this on Netflix: "The Chair" starring Sandra Oh.
Or watch "Lucky Hank" with Bob Odenkirk on Prime.
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