Will some nerd loser strip me of my PhD if I say a bunch of stuff I had to read in graduate school was boring, pretentious, and awful?

It’s possible to love reading and writing after graduate school: finally, a good list

The good books

While I was in graduate school, I participated in a witch’s circle market where I sold my doe-eyed animal and Britney Spears paintings as waterproof stickers to supplement my slim teaching stipend. I used to vend in dive bars around Austin, and was often seated next to an incredible war veteran who housed 50 mostly senior dogs. Yes, you read that correctly. 50. She was goth-ish, selling neon-colored soaps in the shape of all the best macabre symbols like skeletons, bats, and knives. She asked me one day what my dissertation was all about. I gave her a one sentence reply because I didn’t want to get into it. “It’s about Gothic literature in the South and disability studies.” She replied, “that sounds fucking boring.” I wasn’t offended. She was right. It was fucking boring. 

Like all of graduate school, I was creating and perpetuating what I hated the most: shit that was fucking boring. It was a privilege to do what I did, to be sure. I am just throwing this out there for anyone else on earth who might relate: I wasn’t invested, I appreciated having healthcare and avoiding life outside of school, but I felt like everything almost everyone wrote around me bored me to tears. Myself included. I think after I left graduate school I got dumber. I don’t profess to be smart. On this Substack journey, don’t expect too much on the intellectual level. Also expect spelling and grammatical errors. I don’t get paid to write this shit and I’m not in school anymore. This is for funsies. I like to talk about books and writing but also share work, too. I’m looking for others that want to do the same because it’s been a lifelong hyperfixation. 

Goth-ish chick also asked me the other typical questions: Why are you in graduate school? (I don’t know). Will you make a lot of money after you graduate? (No). 

There was so much stuff during my academic literary career I did not want to read because it did not vibe with me or the professor who set the reading list had no capacity to teach. Among all of the awful instructors I encountered which included sexual assaulters, manipulators, and some that were often straight up drunk and high during seminar, they often pretentiously included texts that failed to resonate with me and I would guess, many others. I also got the feeling they themselves did not read what they assigned. I would say 80 percent of things I read in graduate school were not my thing, while maybe 20 percent of it stuck. Perhaps those numbers are good?

I’m not here to debate the need for higher education or the value of graduate programs in English. I actually don’t know and don’t care right now. I neither defend or abhor my experience in academia—it’s a neutral experience I’m somewhat apathetic to now. I probably got a useless degree. We are all going to die: everything is useless. Who cares?

I loved the field exam stage of graduate school, however. In this stage, students draw up an exhaustive list of texts that meet categories in their area: from broader canonical pieces to more niche titles as well as theory and sometimes history or sociology. During the field exam year, I read what I wanted but it still wasn’t me reading “just cuz.” I’m going to include a list of what “just cuz” reading looks like for me at the end of this stack. These books/stories/essays slay and I don’t want to offer a rationale as to why that is. I just want you to read them if your favorite color is pink, you’re morbid, sad, and need help (like me). If this speaks to you, give me recommendations of things you’ve read that have this general vibe. 

So even though I read more formal shit like The Awakening by Kate Chopin (loved it, so aesthetic), I got to control the lists I wanted during the field exam stage. Eventually, when you get to the dissertation stage you have to pick an area to more firmly settle into, so I landed on Gothic and Southern literature because I do genuinely love that area and it was one I could stomach for several years.

If I were to say there is one book that turned me into a literature girly, it would be Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I wasn’t quite an orphan, but I was sad and unwanted. As a tween girl, Brontë connected to that sad part of me filled with unfortunate events and gothic despair. As a reader, I am still very much that girl reading. 

Graduate school moved me left of center. I read and wrote about what I thought I should, largely based on courses that surrounded the canon. In academia, I found Toni Morrison. Sula. Bible. She is everything, so it wasn’t all bad.

The writing I channel lately in my own work invokes witchcraft, femininity, and sometimes motherhood. I’m into doll imagery and technicolor deviance with gothic under and overtones. I’m interested in the bizarre. I want to read something that scares me and comforts my fears at the same time. That’s what I want my own work to do: to feel surreal yet grounded. 

I can do what I want here. There’s no academic focus, just beautiful prose that resonates with me these days. I would be remiss to not mention The Bell Jar and its everlasting impact on me as a sad girl. I am, after all, just a sad teen girl at heart, reading “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “The Rabbit Catcher” on her toughest days. Every day, I’m chasing that high of being a young, lost girl, disassociating into a book that named my sadness and strangeness for the first time.

A list for fellow sad, feminine, weird girls (I’m Aquarius rising)

Bora Chung, Cursed Bunny 

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Ottessa Moshfegh, Eileen

Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic Series (all)

Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat books, Girl Goddess No.9 

ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere 

Ami McKay, The Birth House 

Bonnie Jo Campbell, Once Upon a River 

Etaf Rum, Evil Eye 

Anna Biller, Bluebeard’s Castle

Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Sabrina & Corina 

Ellen Gilchrist, Victory Over Japan

Yvette DeChavez, Lives of the Saints 

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners 

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina 

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 

Samantha Hunt, The Seas

Maggie Nelson, Bluets 

Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower

Lauren Groff, Florida

Karen Russell, Swamplandia! 

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dreamhouse

Ling Ma, Severance

Brom, Slewfoot

Davis Grubb, The Night of the Hunter

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

Mona Awad, Bunny

Youngmi Mayer, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying

Samantha Allan, “I Was a Waitress”

*Full disclosure: I encountered about 20 percent of this list in graduate school, 80% after. Happy…I mean mostly sad, reading!