College Life, New Beginnings
Morgantown by Keith Maillard
John Dupre, a junior at West Virginia University, is an honors student dressed up as a beatnik cowboy, the folk-singing "resident outsider" before nonconformity became a youth uniform.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
"As a senior in high school Quentin Coldwater became preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. After graduating from college and being admitted into a highly exclusive, secret society of magic in upstate New York, he makes a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin's fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined for his childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart."
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
"Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil's name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life."
The Embassy Girls by Julia Davis
"The author, Julia Davis, was a Clarksburg resident who moved to the embassy in London after her father, John, was named ambassador to England. The Embassy Girls is about what it was like for her and her cousin to live there during World War I. As the daughter of the Ambassador, she was invited to all kinds of social situations. She had a blast, by the way. " --Staff member Christy V.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
"A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected."
This Side of Paradise by F Scott Fitzgerald
"F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise is the opening statement of his literary career. Published originally in 1920, the novel captures the rhythm and feel of the gaudy decade that was to follow in America. This Side of Paradise made Fitzgerald simultaneously famous and infamous: famous for the stylish exuberance of his writing and infamous for the errors--in spelling, fact, grammar, and chronology--that peppered his text."
The Secret Place by Tana French
"The photo on the card shows a boy who was found murdered, a year ago, on the grounds of a girls' boarding school in the leafy suburbs of Dublin. The caption says I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to get a foot in the door of Dublin's Murder Squad -- and one morning, sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey brings him this photo. "The Secret Place," a board where the girls at St. Kilda's School can pin up their secrets anonymously, is normally a mishmash of gossip and covert cruelty, but today someone has used it to reignite the stalled investigation into the murder of handsome, popular Chris Harper. Stephen joins forces with the abrasive Detective Antoinette Conway to find out who and why. [...] private underworld of teenage girls can be more mysterious and more dangerous than either of the detectives imagined."
Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake
"Domestic conflicts involving a town's endangerment by mining plans threaten to tear apart a family when matriarch Lace contemplates fighting the mine owners and her daughter, Bant, becomes involved with a miner."
Binti: the Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor
"Binti, a young Himba girl with the chance of a lifetime: to attend the prestigious Oomza University. Despite her family's concerns, Binti's talent for mathematics and her aptitude with astrolabes make her a prime candidate to undertake this interstellar journey. But everything changes when the jellyfish-like Medusae attack Binti's spaceship, leaving her the only survivor. Now, Binti must fend for herself, alone on a ship full of the beings who murdered her crew, with five days until she reaches her destination..."
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
"The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a young girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic that has been translated into more than 40 languages."
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
"Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman."
An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College by Olive San Louie Anderson
"... written by one of the first women graduates, is a historical novel about a young woman's challenges as a member of the first coeducational class at a major university in 1870, the University of Michigan admitted its first woman student."
I am Charlotte Simmons byTom Wolfe
"At Dupont University, an innocent college freshman named Charlotte Simmons learns that her intellect alone will not help her survive."
I'll Take You There by Joyce Carol Oates
"...an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though, gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, "Anellia" (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. [...] Pitiless in exposing the follies of the time (the bizarre "sisterhood" of sororities, the self-lacerating extremes of the intellectual life) [...] a dramatic revelation of the risks -- and curious rewards -- of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual."
The Big U by Neal Stephenson
"...if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer."
You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen
"College student Bec is dangerously adrift. Self-conscious and increasingly uncertain about her long-term plans, she’s studying a major that no longer interests her and is caught up in a bewildering affair with a married professor. In an impulsive attempt to redeem herself, she answers a want ad seeking a caregiver. What she finds is a wealthy, cultivated woman in her midthirties. Once an advertising executive, accomplished chef, and skilled decorator, Kate is now in the advanced stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). [...] The two confront their obstacles unsentimentally, with dark humor and unflinching candor, as their relationship is slowly stripped of pretense. Honesty becomes their touchstone: They may find humor in the most devastating moments, but they won’t pretend to believe in silver linings that don’t exist."
Joyland by Stephen King
"Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973, Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever."
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
"Santiago is a Cuban fisherman who encounters a giant marlin in the Gulf Stream and the battle for his catch becomes one of survival against a band of marauding sharks."
The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks
"After being trapped in an isolated car crash, the life of an elderly [man] becomes entwined with that of a young college [woman] and the cowboy she loves."
"Two couples who have little in common, and who are separated by years and experience. Yet their lives will converge with unexpected poignancy, reminding us all that even the most difficult decisions can yield extraordinary journeys: beyond despair, beyond death, to the farthest reaches of the human heart.” --the publisher
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
"A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. [...] For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer. [...] The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting."
The Krzyzewskiville Tales by Aaron Dinin
"A mix of oral history and fiction about Krzyzewskiville, the Duke basketball tent city that has become famous; the book is modeled after Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales."
Or Try One of These:
"What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad--mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy."
In Barcelona, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War, Andrea, a young university student, moves into a strange, gothic house inhabited by a volatile array of aunts and uncles in order to attend college.
The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez
"[A story of] two women who meet as freshmen on the Barnard campus in 1968. Georgette George does not know what to make of her brilliant, idealistic roommate, Ann Drayton, and her obsessive disdain for the ruling class into which she was born. She is mortified by Ann's romanticization of the underprivileged class, which Georgette herself is hoping college will enable her to escape."
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
" ... [Tassie] has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. [...] As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed."
Trespassers by Meredith Sue Willis
"In this third novel of the Blair Morgan trilogy, Blair and some of her activist friends move to New York City where Blair involves herself in the swirl of political action at Columbia University during the famous student anti-war sit-ins of 1968. At the same time, she works at Bellevue Hospital where one of her patients, a chess playing paralyzed man, becomes the sounding board for her understanding of world affairs and her explorations in love." --Amazon.com
I'm Still a Young Man by Thomas S Bruce
"We should excise determination in finding a path to our goals. In addition to that, we should excise lifting each other up in love. When you give up your life or take someone elses life, you get zero in life. We cant keep losing our young men. Read this book and see that everyone has obstacles in their life." --Author description, Amazon.com
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
"...Charles Dickens’s great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution [... which] underscores many of his enduring themes [of] imprisonment, injustice, social anarchy, resurrection, and the renunciation that fosters renewal." --Amazon.com
Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates
"Remembering Minette Swift, the talented, assertive, 19-year-old African-American girl enrolled as a scholarship student in an exclusive, mostly white liberal arts college near Philadelphia who died under mysterious circumstances fifteen years earlier, Genna, her former roommate, begins an unofficial inquiry into her death. As she reconstructs their tumultuous freshman year at the college in race-torn 1960s Philadelphia, Genna is led also to reconstruct her life as the daughter of a famous "radical-hippie-lawyer" of the 1960s."
The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell
"An ivy league murder, a mysterious coded manuscript, and the secrets of a Renaissance prince collide memorably in The rule of four -- a brilliant work of fiction that weaves together suspense and scholarship, high art and unimaginable treachery. It's Easter at Princeton. Seniors are scrambling to finish their theses. And two students, Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris, are a hair's breadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili -- a renowned text attributed to an Italian nobleman, a work that has baffled scholars since its publication in 1499."