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Intro
Truly, college can feel like a big jump and an anxiety trip as you begin to count down the days till class begins. Novels can be a great way to help you fantasize or detach from college. By the end of this blog post, you will have some suggestions for fiction novels set in college to read.
College Living
College is the first big jump into independent adulthood. Throughout your college years, you develop living habits, new critical speculations, and specific preferences. While you expand your knowledge in specific fields, fiction novels are a great way to live college through others’ lives. Whether you wish to immerse yourself or separate yourself from some of the healthy college stress you will start to feel.
Benefits of Recreational Reading
College, ultimately, can take over your mental health if you let the stress consume you. The issue on the table is finding time for recreational reading. The gentle act of sitting down with a novel and reading from a new perspective on life can help you self-soothe and regulate your college stress.Â
Creating a routine of recreational reading in college can be tricky. However, with the right habits, you can implement reading in your everyday routine and reap the benefits.Â
Benefits:
- Softer stimulation for entertainment
- Helps you empathize with different people’s experiences
- Expands your vocabulary and worldly knowledgeÂ
- Stimulates conversations with your mentors/peers
- Helps you fall asleep faster as opposed to scrolling on your phone
- Develops ways to analyze and critique perspectives
- Form friendships with other readersÂ
To better analyze novels you’re reading, check out the blog post below to read like a writer.
Reading in College
It’s true, your schedule fills up when you are in college and consistently having independent work to finish in your downtime. Here are some tips to help you fall into a habit of making time for reading.Â
- Save an hour before bed to commit to reading
- Start your day early with a good book as you sip on your needed caffeine!
- When stressed, pick up a book
- Keep a book with you when you go about your dayÂ
- When you are waiting for something, open your novel to pass the time
- Listen to an audiobook on a walk or in the carÂ
- Carry a Kindle or digital book with you and save yourself the extra loadÂ
- Annotate and highlight your personal copy to help with your focus and keep you engaged
- Read a novel in the library, before class starts, or during your lunch break
- Start a book club with your friends and talk about the chapters you are finishing together
- Read aloud with others, play out scenes, and use fun voices/accents.Â
- Talk to professors about the books you’re reading and get their recommendations
Novels Set in College
Whether it’s your first year in college or not, everyone’s experience is different. Enjoy some novels that can alter your perspective on the possibilities each student has.Â
Bunny by Mona Awad
The Secret History by Donna Hart
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
Stoner By John Williams
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has known.Â
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras.Â
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Russo’s protagonist is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the reluctant chairman of the English department of a badly underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. Devereaux’s reluctance is partly rooted in his character–he is a born anarchist– and partly in the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
 Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices.Â
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Conclusion
In conclusion, college can be the best years of your life if the stress doesn’t drown you. Find a fun novel to help you through your years or to feel nostalgic about the past. Enjoy the fantasy worlds of other college perspectives as you continue your academics now!
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