Novels you can pick up and put down/ read in snippets. Currently reading Baldwin’s Another Country and loving it. Also open to recs for books that would appear in a comp lit class! Give me your old syllabi!

Question

Emily Teague · Answer

Yale’s Literature Syllabus: Here is Yale’s 2025 Directed Studies reading list, a collection of classic texts that serves as the foundation for many of Yale’s Comparative Literature majors. It might have something you haven’t read.

Mary · Answer

The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy): Mayor of Casterbridge is something I read in high school but did not appreciate until I was in college. Hardy is a wonderful descriptive writer who immerses the reader in his scenes. It was originally published as a weekly serialisation and can be read more gradually.

Sarah Cooney · Answer

brother of the more famous jack: A friend recommended this to me twenty years ago and my GOD, the way I needed this book as a teen and in my twenties and now in my thirties. Women’s literature about REAL things, not the derogatory mess that gets published for women’s interests. Real, meaty, bawdy, funny, heartbreaking, a romp.