Welcome to Bookpeach!

An intro to the Stack + my favorite dark academia reads

Welcome to the first edition of Bookpeach! As many of y’all know, I’ve wanted to produce some version of this newsletter for a long time. I'm so grateful you are here with me.

I’ve spent the last five years working as a journalist in a breakneck newsroom, and I am often asked: “With a job like that, how do you read so much?”

Honestly, the answer doesn’t lie in some monastic discipline or Goodreads yearly challenge. I hate the sanctimonious attitude many readers take with consuming books. It’s not a race, and reading 100+ books at lightning speed just isn’t possible for most people.

The truth is I use reading - especially fiction - as a way to learn more about the world and escape the drudgery of everyday news. Whether it’s a culturally relevant memoir, a historical novel or even a fluffy romance, books have the ability to transport us to faraway places and meet new people.

I’ve felt this way about books since before I can remember, with a special love for those I picked up in adolescence (hello, Harry Potter and The Giver and The Princess Diaries and Molly Moon). In fact, I scarcely remember a time BEFORE I had a book with me always.

The novelist John Greene (one of my boyfriend’s faves) puts it well:

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

I live for this feeling. The feeling that what I’m reading needs to be talked about and discussed and shared. And I hope with Bookpeach, you can find new books and share which ones make YOU feel this way, too.

Why now? 

I am currently in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship (totally unrelated to books, although I do plan to do a ton of reading!), so this year, with its blank page of openness, feels like the perfect time to begin this endeavor.

The plan

Every week, I’ll share with you some book recommendations, bits and bobs from the literary world, and have a conversation with a reader in my life. 

I’d love to hear suggestions from you, too! I will take care to read every email and comment. 

For this first dispatch, I thought I would put together my personal list of recommendations from one of the biggest trends in the bookfluencer world — dark academia. And while I have complicated feelings about the whole world of “booktok” (more on that in a future post!), I certainly see the appeal.

There’s something about a campus novel that makes you want to curl up with a big mug of coffee, preferably with a cuddly animal nearby, and dive in.¹

Dark Academia Reccos – Part One

• I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

  

  • Bodie Kane, a successful podcaster and journalist, never got over being a scholarship kid at the ritzy Granby School. Looking to escape marital issues back home in Los Angeles, she agrees to teach a podcast course to winter term students. The subject? The murder of her popular roommate, Thalia Keith. 

  • For some reason, I was never able to get into Makkai’s beloved The Great Believers, but this one grabbed me right away. Makkai herself lives on a boarding school campus, and you can feel that infused into this page-turner. This book is not without flaws – I found it sagged under its own heft (nearly 500 pages!), and the ending left more to be desired. But I still recommend.

  • Read if you like: true crime podcasts, gossiping about people who “peaked” in high school, unreliable narrators. (Bookshop, Barnes & Noble)

• Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

  

  • This is another novel from the perspective of a scholarship student at a glossy private academy – this time the fictional Ault School on the East Coast. Sittenfeld has been a bit hit-or-miss for me these past few years, but there’s a reason why this debut is so lauded. As my friend Lindsay aptly reminded me, “Prep is the book we all secretly passed around in junior high to learn about sex. And for good reason.”

  • Read if you like: hot boys with impossible names, gossip girl, using “summer” as a verb (Bookshop, Barnes & Noble)

• The Orchard by David Hopen

  

  • Ari Eden grows up in an ultra-orthodox community in Brooklyn before moving to a Jewish academy in an affluent Miami suburb. Adopted by the “popular” group at school, Ari feels community like never before. Soon, under the direction of a charismatic rabbi, Ari's group of friends takes their religious study to an unforeseen, and tragic, end.

  • The Orchard did not get the attention it deserved IMHO. This is an oversimplification, but this book, written by Yale Law student David Hopen, is basically the Jewish version of The Secret History. 

  • Read if you like: spiritual mysticism, bildungsroman, JD Salinger (Bookshop, Barnes & Noble)

• The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz

  

  • After being invited by a famous feminist horror novelist to a month-long writing retreat, Alex is determined to make her time count. What follows is a disturbing series of events that leave her questioning both her desire to “make it” and her own sanity. 

  • OK, I hate the cover of this book, but it’s so good – I promise! Although the dual narrative can grow tiresome, I still recommend. This book is especially fun for a spooky October.

  • Read if you like: Sapphic romances, witchy potions, the part of “Girls” where Hannah goes to Iowa (Bookshop, Barnes & Noble)

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this first post. I am so grateful for this community, and am excited to share pieces of that with y’all here at Bookpeach. 

XOX

Alli

1. I have more recs for dark academia – stay tuned for the complete list!