25. The Idiot (2020) by Elif Batuman In some ways, The Idiot by Elif Batuman seems like the most campus of campus novels, so it’s the perfect one to begin our list, if for no other reason than that for the first half of the book, you feel like you are going to college with the novel’s socially-clueless narrator Selin. You travel with her as she decorates her dorm room, goes to class, and meets her roommates with all their idiosyncrasies; then you witness her discover her first friend, soak in Fellini movies, and try to understand the nuances of romantic relationships. Selin’s voyage through the often-confusing terrain of young adulthood takes her first to Harvard, then to Paris and Hungary and finally to the birthplace of her ancestors in Turkey. Her extracurricular travel means not all of the novel takes place on a college campus but enough time is spent at Harvard that I think it safely qualifies. Selin's often bewildered by the world around her, fascinated by people with opinions, inept at small talk, and unprepared for the chances she takes. At the same, she analyzes Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and wonders at the importance of a story that justifies a man sacrificing an old woman to enable his own intellectual development. She puzzles over the internally inconsistent world of Stoker's Dracula. Fascinated by language, she prefers the written word to the spoken one, and yet ultimately is not sure she understands anything at all. In grad school, I always felt like the more I learned, the more I realized how much more there was to know. It's a cyclical feeling, and yet—that's what I loved about it—the expanding world view, challenges to preconceived notions, and exposure to people of different backgrounds with different opinions and experiences. Selin is by no means the idiot the title suggests, but she certainly has a lot more to learn. ✔️ Intellectually-rigorous Harvard setting ✔️ Coming of age story