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Congratulations! The school year is done (or almost done) for most of you. For all you college bound seniors excited for the next stage of life, this is your last real high school summer. You probably want to spend your summer hanging out with your friends at that one 18-and-over club within driving distance (Eduify does not endorse illegal activities), but you should know two things. First, try not to get arrested. Second, try to read something at some point in the next three months.

I know it’s seriously cramping your style to have to do any sort of mind exercise after you finished your whirlwind year of APs, SATs, and college applications, but college is an entirely different game than high school, and it’s important to keep your minds sharp and fresh. Contrary to popular belief, you won’t melt like the Wicked Witch if you walk into a library. To ease the process of reading, here are some great summer reading (i.e. not too heavy, nothing Pynchonian or Foster-Wallacesque) books ABOUT college life. Some are optimistic, some are pessimistic, and in some, people actually die. All are great books set in a realistic collegiate atmosphere – perfect for those incoming college freshmen looking for hints of what is to come. Not to be ominous or anything.

5. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. From Publisher’s Weekly, “Narrator Richard Papen comes from a lower-class family and a loveless California home to the “hermetic, overheated atmosphere” of Vermont’s Hampden College. Almost too easily, he is accepted into a clique of five socially sophisticated students who study Classics with an idiosyncratic, morally fraudulent professor. Despite their demanding curriculum (they quote Greek classics to each other at every opportunity) the friends spend most of their time drinking and taking pills. Finally they reveal to Richard that they accidentally killed a man during a bacchanalian frenzy; when one of their number seems ready to spill the secret, the group–now including Richard–must kill him, too. The best parts of the book occur after the second murder, when Tartt describes the effect of the death on a small community, the behavior of the victim’s family and the conspirators’ emotional disintegration. Here her gifts for social satire and character analysis are shown to good advantage and her writing is powerful and evocative.”

4. The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis. Publisher’s Weekly review: “This tale of privileged college students at their self- absorbed and childish worst is the very book that countless students have dreamed of writing at their most self-absorbed and childish moments. With one bestseller to his credit, Less Than Zero author and recent Bennington College graduate Ellis has had the unique opportunity of seeing his dream become a reality and all those other once-and-future students can breathe a sigh of relief that it didn’t happen to them. Through a series of brief first-person accounts, the novel chronicles one term at a fictional New England college, with particular emphasis on a decidedly contemporary love triangle (one woman and two men) in which all possible combinations have been explored, and each pines after the one who’s pining after the other. Theirs is a world of physical, chemical and emotional excess of adolescent fantasy of sex, drugs and sturm und drang where in characters are distinguished only by the respective means by which they squander their health, wealth and youth.”

3. On Beauty by Zadie Smith. From the Amazon.com review, “Howard Belsey is a middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington, a thinly disguised version of one of the Ivies. He is a Rembrandt scholar who can’t finish his book and a recent adulterer whose marriage is now on the slippery slope to disaster. His wife, Kiki, a black Floridian, is a warm, generous, competent wife, mother, and medical worker. Their children are Jerome, disgusted by his father’s behavior, Zora, Wellington sophomore firebrand feminist and Levi, eager to be taken for a “homey,” complete with baggy pants, hoodies and the ever-present iPod. This family has no secrets–at least not for long. They talk about everything, appropriate to the occasion or not. And, there is plenty to talk about”

2. Lucky Jim by Kinsley Amis. From the Amazon.com review, ” In Lucky Jim, Amis introduces us to Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a British college who spends his days fending off the legions of malevolent twits that populate the school. His job is in constant danger, often for good reason. Lucky Jim hits the heights whenever Dixon tries to keep a preposterous situation from spinning out of control, which is every three pages or so. The final example of this–a lecture spewed by a hideously pickled Dixon–is a chapter’s worth of comic nirvana. The book is not politically correct (Amis wasn’t either), but take it for what it is, and you won’t be disappointed.”

1. If you are going to Rutgers (where this novel is set) or if you are going to any college in the fall, make sure you read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I will go on record as saying this was the best novel I read published in the last 5 years. Booklist has this to say: “Díaz’s gutsy short story collection Drown (1996) made the young Dominican American a literary star. Readers who have had to wait a decade for his first novel are now spectacularly rewarded. Paralleling his own experiences growing up in the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, he has choreographed a family saga at once sanguinary and sexy that confronts the horrific brutality at loose during the reign of the dictator Trujillo. Díaz’s besieged characters look to the supernatural for explanations and hope, from fukú, the curse unleashed when Europeans arrived on Hispaniola, to the forces dramatized in the works of science fiction and fantasy so beloved by the chubby ghetto nerd Oscar Wao, the brilliantly realized boy of conscience at the center of this whirlwind tale. Writing in a combustible mix of slang and lyricism, Díaz loops back and forth in time and place, generating sly and lascivious humor in counterpoint to tyranny and sorrow. And his characters—Oscar, the hopeless romantic; Lola, his no-nonsense sister; their heartbroken mother; and the irresistible homeboy narrator—cling to life with the magical strength of superheroes, yet how vibrantly human they are.”