An Annotated List Of Books I Bought My Freshman Year At College
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This is an annotated list of books I bought my freshman year of college (2009-2010). Some of these books I loved and some I grew to love after a few years and lots of beer (looking at you, Faulkner). But others I hated but read because I felt like I needed to be a “cool girl” and read male writers and let go of my tired girly things. It was of course internalized misogyny, but I wasn’t yet aware of that. So I kept picking up books about men, books that I hated, in the hope that it would make me the person I thought I should be.
They didn’t.
- Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I’m not sure why I became obsessed with reading Kerouac, but probably because of the references littered through Gilmore Girls and the general aura of cool guy it represented to me. I hated On the Road from the second I opened it (I just can’t care that much about the woes of white dudes). I hated the representation of women and the better than thou attitudes and mostly the fact that it bored me to tears. But I read every single word of the book, determined to become more cultured, cooler, a little more masculine. I took notes in my first ever moleskine notebook, hoping culture would sift through the air in my hometown to me my first summer home from college. Even after I hated it, I bought a ton more Kerouac: collected novels, an expanded edition of On the Road, his haikus (which I actually do still love: probably the best dose to enjoy Kerouac in).
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. I don’t know why I wanted this book, I really don’t. My favorite books all had women heroines (though they were very problematically white at the time) and involved plucky bookish girls or ghosts or Elizabeth Bennet. But I had started straightening my hair, cut myself some blunt bangs, wore way too much eyeliner and bought a moto jacket on ebay. I couldn’t like Jane Austin, that was for “not cool” girls. So I got Fear and Loathing for Christmas, only making it through a few chapters before abandoning it for some girly book I’m sure I disguised behind a book cover. I respect Thompson has a journalist, but I just couldn’t make myself care about his so called adventures.
- Surprisingly, maybe, I was a history major. When I arrived at college, not understanding what college level history was, I felt like I needed to know everything. So I bought The People’s History of the United States, a decent enough intro text, though it’s a little dated now. I was getting my liberalism in the form of a behometh paperback that I felt I needed to finish cover to cover to become a “real” history major. It’s an enjoyable intro text, but not something I needed to use as a barometer of my success in college.
- Like many insufferable college kids before me, I took a bunch of Philosophy classes my freshman year. I even thought I might major in it, before skipping out in my Sophomore year so I could take more women’s studies courses. I was taking a class called Themes in Existentialism and I had no idea what was going on, though I payed attention and did all my reading. We were assigned hundreds and hundreds of pages by people like Sartre. I’m not sure if my classmates were faking it (probably) or just understood, but I felt like I was the only one out to sea. So on my very first trip to New York City (I took a greyhound from my college in Philadelphia) I went to the Strand and bought Existentialism is a Humanism, a tiny lecture based book of Sartre’s. I figured maybe I could understand it in very brief form. I couldn’t, but I still have the book on my shelf to remind myself of the tiny, hip, philosophizing girl I was.
