☕🤎 Welcome to Books & Beverages, where we will discuss everything and anything while sipping some cozy drinks! ✒️✨
Today's topic is:
"What exactly is academia?"
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled” – Plutarch
While this is a term that's been going around the past few years, I've come to realize that I don't exactly know how to describe it besides saying it has something to do with studying and school. That's why I decided to do a deep dive into this topic, and try to find some book recommendations after defining it.
According to Aesthetics Wiki:
Academia encompasses a group of aesthetics centered around the themes of learning, study, research, and reading, often drawing visual inspiration from historical academic settings like older universities (e.g., Oxford). Academia aesthetics often evoke the atmosphere of 19th and 20th-century boarding schools, as popularized by the emergence of Dark Academia around 2014. Light Academia later developed as a contrasting aesthetic, emphasizing the lighter, more joyful aspects of learning and life, yet sharing stylistic elements with its darker counterpart.
The website continues to define specific subtypes like dark, light, green, romantic academia, and more. As I already mentioned in my "What makes the best autumn setting?" post, when autumn comes, I tend to read more books set in school (boarding school, college, academy etc.), so of course, I always look for academia recs.
Here's also the definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
Academia - the life, community, or world of teachers, schools, and education
I guess I wasn't far of in my description after all 😅 Usually, when you Google "academia books," you'll mostly get classics, which is not a bad thing. Except, I don't want to read classics 😂😂 I'm a YA girly all the way through and I've had enough of the classics in school. That's why I'm gonna recommend some books that I think would fit with this genre, and then I'm gonna show you books that are on my TBR list that other people marked as "academia."
The first three books I have for you are all about whip-smart girls who have to take down a murderer who has been killing people at their boarding schools/academies. The premise is the same, but all three books can stand on their own, and I equally enjoyed each one.
These next three books focus more on the studying aspect (although SJTR also has a murder mystery) and don't exactly have a school setting. Ink and Bone is about a group of smart young people who are on the path of becoming a part of the Great Library - they have to prove their worth by passing all sorts of tests and showing their knowledge.
SJTR features a female character who is studying forensic medicine (at a time when that's mostly a male profession), who also uses her cleverness to find a serial killer.
The Madman's Daughter, on the other hand, talks about a girl who is both fascinated and terrified of her father's dangerous scientific experiments. She has to decide whether to follow her father's footsteps and scientific curiosity, or stop him in his madness.
Moving on, here are some books that I plan on reading someday, preferably this autumn 😂😂
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