(Untitled)

[proofrawk]

What are your favorite books about academia?

Comments

[wavesofwood]

Possession by A S Byatt (literary detective story; Victorian poets) and The Secret History by Donna Tartt (murderous Classics students)

[wavesofwood]

Actually, although they're all plays, perhaps Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (chaos theory, mathematics, landscape gardening, and history), The Invention of Love, also by Tom Stoppard (Classics and unrequited gay pining) and The History Boys by Alan Bennett (sixth form boys, how history happens, the way we teach history).

I KNOW I'M GOING TO THINK OF MORE IN A MINUTE. BOOKS ABOUT HOW LEARNING IS SEXY, FUCK YEAH.

[proofrawk]

Ugh, The Secret History is so good.

[wavesofwood]

Oh god, I know, right? The way she writes about Ancient Greek kills me. (Um, no pun intended /o\)

[littleannemouse]

Straight Man by Richard Russo, Moo by Jane Smiley, and The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I started reading The Groves of Academia by Mary McCarty over the summer, but I couldn't really get into it. Oh, and Pnin, by Nabokov.

[littleannemouse]

I meant The Groves of Academe, not Academia.

[givemeattention]

I second Straight Man. Moo is on my shelf waiting to be read...it looks good.

[kondo85]

On Beauty be Zadie Smith

[the_jun]

I second that

[agnes_perdita]

Hallucinating Foucault and anything that focuses on Unseen University in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

[agnes_perdita]

Sorry, that first book's by Patricia Duncker

[ataxi]

White Noise by Delillo, and Moo.

[ndwarf64]

White Noise is my favorite book ever. I re-read it every year. It is perfection.