The image of the stressed-out stu­dent bear­ing a bag full of books as s/he trudges to the library aptly reflects a sig­nif­i­cant part of the col­lege expe­ri­ence. But what is in that bag, exactly? Across my col­lege career, mine was at times filled with a heavy eco­nom­ics text­book (yikes) and intro­duc­tory polit­i­cal sci­ence tomes. Later I scoured the library for every book I could find on youth, polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion, and the media for my senior the­sis paper. Books, it would seem, make the student.

My fresh­man core sem­i­nar was an Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture class called Urban Fic­tions. The read­ings were based around the cities from which they orig­i­nated and/or examined—from Baude­laire and Paris to Glo­ria Nay­lor and New York City. Nina Revoyr’s con­tem­po­rary novel South­land served as a sort of cor­ner­stone for the course since it was about Los Ange­les, where Occi­den­tal Col­lege is located. The book is part mys­tery and part his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive about the Watts riots in 1965. I think that read­ing fic­tion that takes place wher­ever you are liv­ing at the time can be a par­tic­u­larly mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ence because lit­er­ary writ­ing can shed light on his­tory and cul­ture in ways that non-fiction accounts sim­ply cannot.

Part of why I decided to attend Oxy was because I was born in Los Ange­les, but read­ing South­land in my first semes­ter of col­lege opened up a whole dif­fer­ent aspect of the city for me. Of course I rec­om­mend the book, but I also rec­om­mend seek­ing out lit­er­a­ture about what­ever city your new uni­ver­sity is located—it can be a very valu­able way to con­tex­tu­al­ize the start of a col­lege career.

Inter­est­ingly, an intro­duc­tory the­ater class required Let­ters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke as part of a mem­o­riza­tion exer­cise. The book dis­penses poetic advice and insight in the form of let­ters that Rilke wrote to a for­mer stu­dent. Some­times the advice comes off as a lit­tle cheesy and other times a bit grandiose—I remem­ber gush­ing about the book to a class­mate who rolled his eyes in appar­ent disagreement—but it’s a rare occa­sion that such a book is assigned these days, espe­cially in a the­ater class.

We did not use the book very much beyond that early assign­ment, which left me with the slim vol­ume of life advice that I’ve since re-read sev­eral times. I find the lyri­cism of the words com­fort­ing and the con­tent moti­vat­ing, a com­bi­na­tion that can become very use­ful when adjust­ing to col­lege life.

I took a Span­ish class called His­panic Auto­bi­og­ra­phy the semes­ter before I left to study abroad in Chile. Read­ing Mi País Inven­tado (My Invented Coun­try) by famed Chilean writer Isabel Allende was an excel­lent way to pre­pare, plus I pre­sented on the book with two class­mates who were also get­ting ready for the same pro­gram. Read­ing about a place before you travel there is a time-honored way of enrich­ing the expe­ri­ence, but Allende’s atten­tion to detail and reflec­tions on the nuances of daily life dur­ing Chile's dic­ta­tor­ship also height­ened my atten­tion to detail in my own life and travels.

Some­times when I look back on my four years of col­lege, I see stretches of time and expe­ri­ence punc­tu­ated with what I read. None of these books were for classes in my field of study, pol­i­tics. Of course sev­eral read­ings from courses in my major also stand out in my mem­ory, but these are the periph­eral three; a few vol­umes that formed a sort of cere­bral bor­der around the major­ity of my learning.

So there you have it. What books meant some­thing to you in col­lege? What should every col­lege stu­dent read?