Back to school
If my math is right, for 31 years of my life, early September or thereabouts meant back to school. I spent a long time as a student, going to law school and graduate school, and then taught after. Perhaps because September marks a change of season in a way that January doesn’t (from summer to fall, rather than from winter to… more winter) or perhaps because I have a September birthday, or perhaps the combination of all these things with the start of the school year, September still feels more like a new year to me than the official turn of the calendar in January. It is my favorite time of year.
The biggest fresh start to me in all of that still feels like back to school, and so this month, I’m going to do a series of back to school posts. I haven’t decided all of what I’m going to cover yet, but they will be books that are set in school, books that I first encountered in a school setting, books that I’ve taught.
Part of the reason for this is because I love this time of year, but also, I feel like literature loves back to school time as well. There are campus novels, and dark academia is on the rise as a genre. The academic calendar works well as a way to structure the story. There is a built-in progression, beginning to end. There are inherent pockets of tension – midterms and finals. Then there are the tensions inherent in the setting – the sports events, the dances, the sororities and secret clubs. And faculty are not immune from the hot house atmosphere either, the petty intensity of ivory tower politics, the temptations offered by the new crop of graduate students. Perhaps this is the characters’ first time away from home, and there are the freedoms and stresses that go with that. Even in books for younger readers, school is a location outside of direct parental supervision, a place to begin to be a different self. All of these things can be useful to make stories out of. I’ve done it myself, turning a graduate seminar in literature into a slantwise modern version of Camelot.
So this month, we’ll head back to school here, too. For now, I’ve opened up the comments. If you have a favorite book that fits this back to school theme, please feel free to share.
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