I have three months before grad school starts and I want to read widely. What books should every serious literature student have read that often get skipped in standard curricula?
My unpopular literature opinion that I’ll defend to anyone: short stories are a more impressive and demanding art form than novels. The severe constraints of the short story form demand a precision, economy, and intentionality that novelists can afford to lack. Every single word in a truly great short story is structurally load-bearing.
The best literature podcast I’ve found after trying dozens is the New York Review of Books podcast. The conversations between writers, critics, and scholars are genuinely intellectual and illuminating without ever becoming pretentious or exclusionary. They cover an impressively wide range of authors, traditions, and literary periods. For something more accessible and entertaining, the older episodes of Thug Notes on YouTube do genuinely excellent analytical breakdowns of classic literature in a very engaging, unpretentious style.
To add a different angle, i organize my personal library by a system I affectionately call ‘vibes’ and I refuse to apologize for it. Fiction is separated into roughly four zones: dark and emotionally heavy, light and fun, experimental and formally weird, and comfort rereads that I return to regularly. Non-fiction is organized by broad topic area. It makes absolutely no alphabetical or Dewey Decimal sense, but I can always find exactly what I’m in the mood to read next, which is the actual functional point of organizing books for a personal collection.
Imposter syndrome in literature seminars is incredibly common and almost universal in my experience. The students who seem like they’ve read absolutely everything and can effortlessly reference obscure theorists are usually just very good at strategically referencing the few things they have read. Nobody has read everything. And the ones who confidently name-drop Deleuze and Derrida in every class discussion are often significantly less insightful than the quiet student who has a genuine, carefully thought-through, personal response to the actual text being discussed.
How I found my favorite author is actually a great icebreaker question that reveals a lot about how people relate to literature. For me, it was a professor’s completely offhand, throwaway comment during a lecture on something else entirely. She mentioned this writer as a brief aside, said something like ‘if you haven’t read their work yet, you’re genuinely missing out,’ and I went directly to the campus library that afternoon on a whim. Sometimes the best literary recommendations come from people who aren’t consciously trying to recommend anything at all.
Adding to this, i’m currently reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and it’s exactly what I needed after a heavy, reading-intensive semester. It’s literary fiction that is genuinely compelling as a story, not just as a vehicle for themes. The way it weaves between timelines is masterful without ever becoming confusing. Highly recommend if you want something that’s thoughtful and well-crafted but not exhausting to read.
BookTok and similar social media book communities have been a net positive for reading culture overall, even if the literary discussions on those platforms tend to be pretty shallow and focused on aesthetics over substance. Getting millions of young people genuinely excited about reading books and buying books and talking about books is worth more to literary culture than sophisticated academic analysis that reaches a few hundred people. The depth of engagement can develop over time. First you need people to pick up books in the first place.
One more thought on this. the best practical preparation for the reading demands of graduate school isn’t reading more books right now. It’s developing two distinct reading strategies and knowing when to deploy each one. Speed reading techniques for contextual, non-essential texts where you need the gist and the main argument quickly. Deep, slow, annotated reading techniques for the essential primary and theoretical texts that are central to your research. You simply cannot closely read everything assigned in grad school – there’s far too much. Learning to triage and allocate your reading attention effectively is every bit as important as learning to analyze deeply.