College Students Are Reading Less. This UVA ‘BookTok’ Influencer Wants To Change That

[William Dozier speaking]

In this video, I'm going to start by giving you a list of recommendations that you can take with you and run. I want to set you up with a list of titles and authors that you should definitely try reading in your 20s.

At the end of the video, I'll reflect a little on my own 20s, but I want to save that for the end because not all of you are going to stick around for that. So, I'd rather start with what’s most important for you and focus on me – the less important subject – towards the end.

Something that people don’t talk about enough is that everyone is assigned a lot of classic books to read in middle and high school before they’re quite ready to fully understand what’s going on in those books. One big trend in your 20s is that you'll be much more ready to understand books that you've already read before. But since you’ve already read them, they might seem less interesting, or you just won’t think to revisit them.

I highly encourage you to go back to books you read when you were around 15 in your English class and give them another try. That’s a recurring theme on this channel – a lot of the books I recommend are ones that people commonly read earlier in life. Take “The Great Gatsby,” for example. I think you'll get a lot more out of “The Great Gatsby” in your 20s than you will when you're 13, 14 or 15 years old.

In your 20s, you’re also much better equipped to deeply understand short stories. Short stories are my favorite kind of fiction. That’s what I write primarily, what I studied in school, and what has had the greatest impact on my life and thinking.

I would first point you in the direction of Amy Hempel – she is an absolute master of the short story form. Short story writing is often more technically demanding than writing a novel, and Amy Hempel is what I would call a writer’s writer. She’s the kind of writer other writers admire, even when they fully understand the craft but still can’t fathom how she does what she does. I admire her work a great deal. Honestly, you should just pick up “The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.” She published a lot of collections, and her stories first appeared in different publications like The New Yorker before they were collected but just get her entire collected works.

In your 20s, you’re also better equipped to understand more experimental forms of fiction. I highly recommend checking out Lydia Davis’s “Can’t and Won’t.” A lot of what’s in that collection is what’s termed "flash fiction" – fiction shorter than a short story, often fitting on a single page. That’s a reductive way to describe “Can’t and Won’t,” but it gives you an idea.

The writer who has meant the most to me personally– and basically saved my life at a couple of different points – is Denis Johnson. He wrote an incredible short story collection called “Jesus’ Son,” which is probably his best-known work. That collection is semi-autobiographical and revolves around his years in his 20s when he was addicted to drugs.

Denis Johnson’s fiction is incredibly useful for understanding what it might be like to struggle with substance abuse or to be totally disenfranchised – completely down and out, homeless, abandoned by family. I recommend “Jesus’ Son” because Johnson, one of the greatest and most underrated writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, is at the height of his powers in that collection. He was a poet, a novelist, and a short story writer, and you can see why he was so exceptional in all three forms in that one book.

In your 20s, you’re either out of school already or nearing the end of your education, even if you're in graduate school. Coming-of-age stories are important to read at this stage. Two works of fiction that had a huge impact on me when I was finishing up college are “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz and “This Is How You Lose Her,” also by Díaz.

“This Is How You Lose Her” is a short story collection, but the stories are sequenced so well that reading it feels like experiencing a short novel. Junot Díaz is a powerful writer. I know this is a cliché comparison, but reading Junot Díaz for the first time felt like only ever hearing acoustic instruments and then suddenly hearing an exceptionally good electric guitar player for the first time.

His collection “This Is How You Lose Her” is one of the few reading experiences where I was totally gripped and, frankly, awestruck. I had the chance to meet him in college, and I was so nervous to shake his hand and talk to him.

Another book I want to recommend is Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” It’s about a couple of 16-year-olds crossing the border from Texas into Mexico. Structurally, it’s a straight-up coming-of-age story – a Bildungsroman, if you will. If you’ve never read McCarthy before, you’re going to be blown away by his prose.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of recommendations, but it’s a great starting point for your 20s. If you haven’t read anything by Jesmyn Ward, do yourself a favor and pick up one of her books. She is so consistently great, but “Sing, Unburied, Sing” is the novel I’d point you toward first.

That book is a master class in craft. There’s a section toward the back half that contains some of the most impressive prose I’ve ever read. It just lifts off the page and becomes something entirely different. Novels are at their best when they, quite literally, sing and Ward absolutely knocks that ending out of the park.

You might notice I’ve been avoiding classics. I slipped up and mentioned one at the beginning of this video, but a novel that has definitely achieved classic status and still deserves mention is “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin.

I made a full video about it, but I’ll say briefly that “Giovanni’s Room” is a short novel about two men in a relationship in Paris in the 20th century when it was not fully legal for them to be together. The weight of the potential consequences hangs over the entire narrative, making it incredibly intense.

Your 20s are a time of immense change. You’re starting to become an adult member of your family, and that comes with its own challenges – aging parents, illnesses, diagnoses that aren’t good. The only essay collection I want to plug in this video is Jonathan Franzen’s “How to Be Alone,” specifically the essay “My Father’s Brain,” which is about his father’s mental decline.

For memoirs, the only one I’ll recommend here is “This Isn’t Going to End Well” by Daniel Wallace, which, as the title suggests, is about suicide. Wallace approaches the subject delicately and with a fond sense of humor, adding levity where needed. It’s a powerful read, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Fiction is at its best when it focuses on the human condition – on people who don’t often get attention—and when it’s full of rich sensory details that engage us. All of the authors I’ve mentioned have written multiple works I’m sure you’ll love. These are just some of my favorites and the ones that have been most impactful for me.

I’m about to turn 29 soon, so I can personally attest that while you are changing rapidly in your 20s, it’s healthy to stop focusing on yourself every once in a while. Focus on someone else. Dig into a book with the goal of deeply empathizing with the characters and understanding – ideally in a fun way – what it might be like to be someone completely different.

Most importantly, don’t forget to live while you're on your reading journey. The most important things to do in your 20s? Read. Live. Strike a good balance.

That’s my little informal guide to reading in your 20s. I hope you got something valuable out of it. Happy reading, and I’ll see you in the next one!