Indulging in some late-August back-to-school nostalgia, the Daily Beast put together a list of "Must-Read College Novels" ranging from Kingsley Amis’Lucky Jim to John Williams' Stoner. As a fan of college, books, and college books, I thought I’d work up a supplementary list: the principal ingredients that no college novel can do without.

Unfortunate romance
The great thing about romance in college is that it’s either totally doomed from the beginning or the participants are guaranteed to screw it up. At least, this is how I justify my ridiculous relationship with an unsuitable upper classman and the continued obsession I have but could never act on with a simply wonderful professor. Whether it’s faculty, students, or the time-honored tradition of faculty/student infatuation, college is a good time to fall hard for someone who is absolutely wrong for you, but who will continue to tear out your heart with their math skills or commitment to social justice.

College exposes you to romantic situations you are not at all ready for, as seems to be the case in Nathan Harden's new book Sex and God at Yale. You will learn a whole lot about yourself, mostly in the areas of failure and weakness. And it will all seem very important at the time, but not after graduation. Unless you insist on being totally infatuated with past professors, which is completely acceptable.

Blunder
If we can think of adolescence as the time when weird things happen because of our changing bodies, college is like an adolescence for that body being in the larger world. While the awkwardness of high school has passed, the vast and slippery social dynamic of college allows for a whole new set of embarrassments. All college environments have that unique mix of shelter and independence. You have this great chance to redefine yourself, but then you're also more exposed to other people who might actually help you figure out who you really are.

Freedom means that college students will try stupid things (like bleaching your hair). Greater responsibility means that being stupid has more consequences (like having bleached hair). Just ask the characters in Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History.

Illusion of safety
College students are insulated from the real world at the same time they’re learning more about it: their sense of self in relation to the world and the possibilities of what they could do within it are totally exploding and hyper-vivid. And part of the shelter that any college provides is the impression that other people care about your ideas. Any novel can have main characters finding themselves; what makes it a college novel is that characters engage with the same kind of exploration but within a closed system that won’t pan out in real life.

This illusion can also be true for professors, as we learned in Michael Chabon's The Wonder Boys.

Hyper-awareness of time passing
Whether the plot moves forward through the passing semesters or the novel as a whole is a nostalgic look back at such brief time, four years is only four years. College is always in some way about transition. There is perhaps no better illustration of this dramatic shift than Bret Easton Ellis'Less Than Zero. Hopefully, most of us don't find ourselves disillusioned by the party scene in our freshman year because the kids back home were all prostitutes for smack, but who among us didn't experience that same whiff of disappointment — the sense that home had changed without you? The sense that you'd maybe surpassed home?

Serious transition happens with or without college. It's just really, really nice to undergo that transition without your parents looking.

Image: cineplex.com

With the death of the author, Helen Gurley Brown, one can't help wonder what Cosmo would have been like without her.

Perhaps they would have gone the Vogue route, and featured famous authors in their fashion spreads?

Or maybe they would've taken a stark, realistic tone and alerted readers about the latest rise in potent STDs.

Though such a grim article could probably use some Lenny Bruce-like levity.

Or you could always hit up one of the top 10 richest authors to throw some literary bones your way if the subject isn't to your liking.

If all else fails, you could always retire to Argentina, where aging writers get a nice little pension.

Just don't take the same route of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun's hero and wind up in jail.

How do you think that kind of incident will look on your college transcript anyway?

The Millions recently proposed the idea that if MFA graduates were finding themselves unsatisfied with adjunct teaching (which, um, obviously), they should look into teaching high school. Nick Rapatrazone, the post's author, does make some pretty sexy arguments for giving your time to sweaty, self-interested quasi-adults who are horrifying at being adequately human toward one another. Still, I’d like to supplement his advice with a few second thoughts.

Let me be clear: if you’re into teaching high school, I applaud you. The prospect of a bunch of MFAs entering the public school system with enthusiasm and literary encouragement fills me with excitement and something close to glee. But as long as we're weighing it against adjunct teaching, I feel other perspectives might be of use.

Maybe try being poor for one minute. This is not to encourage anyone drowning in adjunct drudgery to continue drowning in adjunct drudgery. You are a sucker and totally not being paid what you’re worth. If you get some weird sadistic glee out of the it, please, by all means, keep encouraging universities to crumble under the weight of their own lack of integrity.

But I have to ask: since when were writers supposed to be comfortable? You really want to have to go back to high school just so you can pay rent? In this economy, I say take whatever shitty job you can get. But I also suspect that there’s this lingering hope that getting an education guarantees some future stability in a fulfilling career. I kind of have the feeling that the whole MFA-to-high-school-teacher track is an adjustment, a concession to the dream that was really only for the generations before you. That shit was for the baby boomers and whatever unnamed generations became between them and...what, Gen X or Y? You need to talk to your grandpa (great grandpa?) about the Depression and lard on bread and some shit 'cause you want way too much.

My point here is that if you want stability while you write, be an artist who doesn’t need the approval of a teaching career. Stop thinking you’re owed something because you went to school. School was a privilege you lucked out on. If you write, worry about writing and don’t give a shit about anything except forming your life to allow writing to happen. And if youstill want to teach, god bless.  

People who went to school for teaching K-12 are turning away from careers in education. My own mother, an excellent and incredibly dedicated public school teacher for over thirty years (and counting) has said she probably wouldn’t have gone into teaching if the atmosphere had been the same as it is now. This largely has to do with the sheer amount of time spent on test preparation for tests that don’t actually result in students learning anything. I find it horrifying that teachers no longer have as much discretion in what they teach, and I find it doubly horrifying that potentially excellent teachers might be turning away from that career because education is now such a shit show. Sure, steady paycheck, making a difference, etc. etc., but anyone going into teaching high school English under the impression that they’re going to teach kids how to appreciate literature should know that such labors will account for maybe twenty percent of their workload.

I hope with all my heart there are folks out there who will fight to make public education better, whether from the classroom or the capitol. But, my fellow MFAs, just know that it will indeed be a fight.

image: bestofthe80s.wordpress.com

Mid-May through end of June, graduation presents are flung to young people like so many palm fronds under asses’ feet. It's been a while since I've had a successful encounter with an institution of booklearnin', but I remember getting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when I finished high school. Never mind that subsequent studies disinclined me to take Pirsig seriously; I read his book when I got it and dreamt of cycling across the plains with nothing but a tent and my meager late-teenage wits.

People like to wrap books up for grads. There's something about it that’s less crass than a sappy card padded with cash or stiffened with an Applebee's gift card. Books enrich, even if they were purchased off a display table with a GIFTS FOR GRADS placard on it. And booksellers love to promote graduation books: they’re part of a spring giving trifecta, along with Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day, that gives a major boost to sales. Way back in ’97, Publishers Weekly noted that this growing “holiday-ization” of book sales—employed mostly by chains, but also by your beloved indies—had helped make May and June the best sales months behind the Christmas season.

Which is only natural. We purchase because we love, y’know.

Now, fifteen years after the industry woke up to its own practices, bookshops are bursting with that vanilla version of graduation gifting, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Dr. Suess's book is supposed to be whimsical, apt, indicative. This cynic doesn’t much think OTPYG is much of the latter two, but it does jiggle with whimsy. And cliché. Because (some) folks take graduation as a cultural milestone that suggests a future wide open with potential greatness and achievement. It’s a token way of saying, "You're destined for great things!" And all the while it affirms the aspirations of a generation of egotists assured they will get exactly what they want, cuz they deserve it. (Never mind if we’re all that way from eighteen to twenty-two.)

But let’s talk about the grad on your list. Let’s say you want to let them know that you actually have given some thought to the unique qualities that make them a human being, qualities that will deepen over the course of their life and make them as pleasant and savory as pi dan. In that case, get them a book that fits with those traits! Not one that was intended for five year olds!

If you haven’t given thought to your giftee's unique qualities, don’t despair. The trick is to not aim at producing easy happiness or honing in on whatever they’re enthusiastic about this year; that shit fades. Instead, giveMiddlemarch. Or Moby-Dick. By the time they get around to reading your book (if they ever do), its emotional complexity and portrayal of life's twisted course will make the sweetest sort of sense it can—that it doesn’t have to.

And in the interim, the book's spine will make your loved one look that much more intelligent whenever their houseguests are looking for the bathroom.

Image: flickr user David Bivins

Something weighing you down? Why don't you come to Ayn Rand for help?

It may help you more than all those self-help books you got after graduating.

Though if one of those books happened to have a one-word title, you may want to give it a second chance.

Just don't go and feel entitled when your self-published one-word title fails to become a bestseller.

You don't want to find yourself turning into a psychotic fictional character over the ordeal.

Just try to calm down, perhaps by turning on some disco?

Don't be ashamed. Afterall, all writers have their own particular quirks.

Dan Brown's quirks are so hard-wired into his system that it can be explained via a handy flowchart.

Image source: USA Today