8 Back to School Books for Adults

Does anything say back-to-school for adults more than a romance set at a school? Marvin loves being a kindergarten teacher. He’s very good at his job, which makes it easy for him to ignore…well, everything else in his life. That’s until he meets Olan, the single dad of a new student. Falling in love with a parent wasn’t the plan, but sometimes the unexpected experiences are the best ones. This is a very sweet, low-stakes, and entertaining romance.

Ross Gay’s essay on school is one of my favorite essays of all time, and it’s one I want to hand to every student, teacher, university faculty member, and parent I know. It’s an essay for anyone with complicated and contradictory feelings about school. But it’s not the only brilliant essay in this book, which is about joy and basketball and music and grief and being human. I can only imagine what a wonderful professor Gay is himself. Spending time with his words is the next best thing to being in his class.

This collection of short poems, all written in various Japanese forms, such as the tanka, may seem like a bizarre pick for a back-to-school books list. But hear me out. These poems are short, often just 3-7 lines, which makes them perfect for reading in little bursts of time between classes and homework. They’re very beautiful and soothing. Chang writes about death and grief and aging, but she also writes about birds, rain, light, the moon, trees. Her imagery is stark and surprising, but the poems feel accessible, sometimes wonderfully simple. This is a book anyone can enjoy, even if you’re new to poetry, which makes it a perfect back-to-school book.

Yes, this is a YA novel, but if you’re looking for a novel that gives you that back-to-school feeling of newness, this is your book. I can’t remember the last time a book captured the specificities of life on a college campus with so much honesty and detail. The story follows Sophie and Jo, two first-year students at Wellesley who run rival Instagram advice accounts. On the internet, they fight, but in real life, they bond over their shared asexuality and soon become best friends. This is a fantastic queer friendship story with the stakes of a romance.

No matter what field you’re studying, school involves reading, and, of course, thinking. There is no better book out there on reading and thinking than Elaine Castillo’s brilliant essay collection, all about what it means to be a reader in the world. Castillo goes far beyond surface-level conversations about politics and representation in media to get at something much more fundamental: what do we mean we when talk about reading, anyway? What responsibilities do readers have? Does reading even matter in a world full of so much oppression and injustice? This is a book I’ll be rereading forever.

This underground lesbian classic from 1949 completely wowed me when I read it a few years ago. I was expecting something maybe juicy and fun. I was not expecting a razor-sharp character study about teenage queer desire and the terrifying, exhilarating, confusing experience of realizing you have a body that wants things. The novel takes place over one tumultuous year at a small French finishing school near Paris. Olivia, who arrives at the school from England, tumbles into deep infatuation with her headmistress. I promise it’s not trite or cliche; Strachey handles the subject matter with incredible nuance.