I spent the entirety of my freshman year of college feeling lost and restless in a sea of other girls who felt the same, only I didn’t know it yet.
One thing I found comforting was finding books about girls like me: girls who were navigating the trials and tribulations of womanhood, the highs and lows of academia, and the good, bad, and ugly of life itself. It really is just so confusing sometimes to be a girl.
So, here are my favorite books that I feel perfectly encapsulate each year of college, from start to finish.
Freshman Year: ‘The Idiot’ by Elif Batuman
“But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year, maybe as many as seven years, to learn to feel nineteen,” from The Idiot.
Elif Batuman truly plucked the words straight out of my brain for this one. Batuman’s debut novel follows Turkish American Selin Karadağ through her freshman year at Harvard University in 1995. We watch Selin navigate her classes, awkward moments, and her first situationship, all experiences that are quintessentially freshman.
I wouldn’t say this book necessarily has a real plot, though it’s split into fall and spring semester chapters. It has more of a stream-of-consciousness feeling that I really enjoy because it makes it seem like you’re actually inside Selin’s head.
Sophomore Year: ‘Either/Or’ by Elif Batuman
“Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?” from Either/Or.
Next up, we have the sequel to The Idiot, because Batuman is just that good. This book follows Selin, whom we should all know and love by now, through her sophomore year at Harvard University.
There’s a lot of philosophical pondering on her end, fitting, as the novel is named after Kierkegaard’s work. Where The Idiot focused on Selin trying to gather her bearings, Either/Or follows Selin as she begins to navigate the world as she understands it.
Junior Year: ‘The Bell Jar’ by Sylvia Plath
“When they asked me what I wanted to be, I said I didn’t know. ‘Oh, sure you know,’ the photographer said. ‘She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, ‘to be everything,'” from The Bell Jar.
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a timeless classic on a young woman’s descent into madness. It’s a semi-autobiographical take on Plath’s life as a college student during a mental health crisis. Esther Greenwood, our narrator, has finished her junior year of college and is participating in a summer writing internship in New York.
Junior year is exactly when the question “What are you doing after college?” stops feeling hypothetical and starts feeling more like, “Oh my god, what am I doing after college?” Esther’s struggles within her own mind often resonate deeply with those who feel overwhelmed by the pressure to choose a path and become just one kind of person.
Senior Year: ‘Conversation with Friends’ by Sally Rooney
“At times I thought this was the worst misery I had experienced in my life, but it was also a very shallow misery, which at any time could have been relieved completely by a word from him and transformed into idiotic happiness,” from Conversations with Friends.
Following two college friends and ex-lovers, Francis and Bobbi, Conversations with Friends captures the deeply confusing feelings of young adulthood, intimacy, and finding your identity. Francis and Bobby find themselves entangled with an older, married couple, Nick and Melissa, leading to interesting dynamics and an intense love affair.
Really, anything written by Salley Rooney is as devastating and coming-of-age-y as a senior year novel should be.
Honestly, though, don’t wait for each year to come around to try these reads. They may best fit with a certain stage in your college career, but they ultimately all speak to that same experience of trying to become a person while everyone else around you seems to have their whole lives together. Happy reading!
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