Selin throws herself into the whole college experience while befriending a Serbian girl named Svetlana and developing a crush on an older mathematics student named Ivan. The story takes place in the 1990s, so some of the references are dated, but you can still empathize with her as she struggles with her living situation, peers, and school. In this book, Selin Karadag is a second-generation Turkish American dealing with her first year at Harvard University. The Idiot by Elif Batumanĭuring freshman year, students might try to figure things out and wonder how to fit in.

These seven books about the college experience dive into these topics and may help students prepare for or deal with the occasional difficulties of college life. They might encounter the stress of difficult coursework and new social environments as they attempt to navigate drama with roommates or friends. For many college students, starting out at a college or university is their first taste of freedom. Let us know how you liked these recommendations by rating a book on BooksRun.Applying to and heading off to college can be an exciting and rewarding experience, but it often comes with a fear of the unexpected. We hope you can choose any of these books about college life according to your likening to ease nostalgia for your days on campus. It differs a lot from the generally enlightening spirit of Freshmen or The Idiot: the life of Oscar de León is full of rather traumatic experiences: a broken heart, bullying classmates, lack of understanding, no social contact, days spent in the dorm room… The novel is not as dark as you might think-you will read it with a compassionate smile on your face, following Oscar through his brief but indeed wondrous life. Where is a campus novel here? Oscar de León-the protagonist-studies at Rutgers University, and, over many pages, we follow his life at college. These all have something to do with a familial curse (fukú). In its basic outline, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a dense intermingling between the stories about the Dominican dictatorship of Trujillo with narratives of adolescence, first love, sci-fi, and generation conflicts.

This Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel from 2007 is hard to ascribe to any specific genre, but some college romance traits are there for sure.

Freshmen by Tom Ellen