The Summer Reading List for Incoming Freshmen
You have one summer left before everything changes. Not in a dramatic way, just in the way that going somewhere new and becoming a different version of yourself always changes things. You won’t come back from college being exactly the same person who left.
Which is the whole point. And it’s also why what you read this summer matters more than it sounds.
These aren’t books about college. They’re not self-help. They won’t give you advice about making friends or managing a syllabus. They’re books that do something slightly harder: they shift how you see yourself, the people around you, and the life you’re walking into. Read them before you get there.
Normal People – Sally Rooney
Normal People follows Connell and Marianne from the end of high school in small-town Ireland through four years at Trinity College Dublin. On the surface it’s a love story. Underneath, it’s one of the most honest accounts of what it feels like to become someone new in college and to watch someone else do the same thing, and to have both of those changes strain something you thought was solid.
Read it because it’s one of the few books that treats being young and uncertain as a real and serious state of being, not a phase to hurry through. Rooney writes about the way power shifts inside relationships, about what happens when two people change at different speeds, about the gap between what you feel and what you say out loud. You will recognize yourself in it whether you want to or not.
Educated – Tara Westover
Educated is a memoir about a woman who grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho with no formal schooling, taught herself enough to get into Brigham Young University, and eventually earned a PhD from Cambridge. It is an extreme version of a thing many first-generation and first-to-leave-home students feel at a lower volume: the specific disorientation of becoming more educated than the people who raised you, and what you are allowed to do with that.
Read it because it is one of the best accounts in recent memory of what it costs to become who you need to be. Westover doesn’t make her journey inspirational in the way inspirational stories usually work. She shows the losses, the loneliness, the long process of learning to trust her own perception. That’s a more useful thing to read before you start college than anything that tells you it’s going to be great.
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Secret History is a novel about a group of classics students at a small Vermont college, the beautiful closed world they build together, and what happens inside it. The plot involves a murder, but the actual subject of the book is the seduction of belonging: how badly you can want to be inside a particular group, how far that wanting can take you, and what you give up to get in.
Read it before you arrive at college because the dynamics it describes are ones you will encounter at a smaller scale: the group that seems to have a private language, the professor whose attention feels like the most important thing, the version of yourself you would need to become to be admitted into a certain room. Tartt wrote it in her twenties and the obsession in it is completely real. It’s also a beautiful novel.
Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner
Crying in H Mart is a memoir by Michelle Zauner, the musician behind Japanese Breakfast, about her Korean-American upbringing, the death of her mother from cancer, and the grief and identity questions that followed. The chapters are held together by food, by memory, by the specific experience of being a person whose identity spans two cultures and belongs fully to neither.
Read it because it is a book about what you carry from home when you leave, and what you discover you’re carrying only once it’s at a distance. Zauner is writing about loss, but she’s also writing about the particular loneliness of figuring out who you are when the person who knew you best is gone. You don’t have to have experienced anything like her specific circumstances for the book to land. The feeling of it does.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow follows two people, Sam and Sadie, who meet in a hospital waiting room when they’re kids, lose touch, find each other again in college, and spend the next thirty years building games together and building a friendship that is the defining relationship of both their lives. It covers creativity, ambition, love without easy romantic framing, and the way two people can shape each other without either of them fully realizing it’s happening.
Read it because it’s one of the best recent books about what it means to make something with another person, and what the collaborations you form in your early twenties become over time. You will meet people this fall who will matter to you in ways you can’t predict yet. This book is about what that can grow into.
The One Honest Thing About This List
None of these books will make August less overwhelming. You will still have a hard first week and feel like everyone else figured out something you didn’t, and the books won’t fix that.
What they do is give you a little more inner life to bring into the room. You’ll have thought about belonging, and what it costs, and what transformation actually requires, and what you carry from home. That doesn’t make the transition easier. It makes you more interesting to yourself while you’re going through it.
Bring at least two of them with you. You’re going to need something to read when you need to be alone without looking like you’re being alone.
