6 Reccomendations To Get You Excited For Dark Academia Season - aka Fall

Now that August, to quote Taylor Swift, slipped away into a moment in time, you might be distraught because Autumn is fast approaching, or excited to be saying goodbye to the long summer we had. If like us, you are part of the latter, the time has come to start your Autumn ritual, bring out the candles, and your favourite blanket to get immersed in the dark academia aesthetic (if you’ve ever left at all).

What better way to start this season than with some quintessential book recommendations for those who have a passion for this nostalgic aesthetic? These are the novels that we’ll be reading or rereading while watching the leaves fall.

6 – Atlas Six

Author: Olivie Blake

Release date: January 2020

Favourite quote: “The problem with knowledge, is its inexhaustible craving. the more of it you have, the less you feel you know.”

The Alexandrian Society is a secret society of magical academicians, the best in the world. Their members are caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity. And those who earn a place among their number will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams. Each decade, the world’s six most uniquely talented magicians are selected for initiation. After being recruited by Atlas Blakely, our six main characters, with their unique abilities, are told that they must prove how much they contribute to arcane areas of knowledge and that only five of them will be initiated into the society.

One of my first reads of 2022, I came across the original, self-published, version of the Atlas Six. Now that it’s been re-released with a beautiful new cover, excellent new illustrations and edited, I can’t wait to revisit the library of Alexandria.

5 – Vicious

Author: V.E. Schwab

Release date: September 2013

Favourite quote: “Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”

College roommates, Victor and Eli, are brilliant and arrogant students who bond over their ambition and sharpness. In their senior year, while delving into the research of near-death experiences and seemingly supernatural events, they discover that under the right conditions, someone can develop exceptional abilities. On paper, their theory is perfect, but when things go from academic to experimental, everything goes wrong.

Ten years later, we find Victor breaking out of prison, with a goal in mind: to find his old friend (now foe), with the aid of his cellmate and a young girl with a remarkable ability. While Victor was in jail, Eli kept busy with a mission to eradicate every person with superpowers he can find, with the exception of his strong-willed sidekick. Both with terrible power, driven by anger and betrayal, this is a revenge story. Who will be left alive at the end?

An instant favourite from the first few pages, Vicious is a perfect blend between superhero mythos and revenge fantasy. Addictive, morally grey and complex, are words that encapsulate the feelings conveyed by this book. Before reading the sequel, I want to return to the first book that made me fall in love with characters that I wouldn’t dare cross paths with in real life.

4 – Vita Nostra

Author: Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Release date: January 2007

“To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an ageing cell. A child picks up a pill from the floor. Words stick to each other, line up, obedient to the great harmony of speech...”

While on vacation with her mother, Sasha Samokhina, meets a mysterious man, Farit Kozhennikov, who directs her to perform tasks in exchange for gold coins. With her summer vacation ending, the man instructs her to move to a remote village and use the gold to enter the Institute of Special Technologies. Albeit a bit hesitant and against her mother’s wishes, Sasha begins her education at the institute and soon discovers that her education will be unlike anything she has ever experienced. The books are impossible to read, the lessons maddening and impossible to memorize, on top of that, the methods of punishment for the students’ transgressions are extreme. Despite being scared and not fully understanding everything that’s happening, Sasha becomes enwrapped in the experiences that are nothing alike anything he had lived before, and that are all she could ever want.

Vita Nostra has belonged to be TBR list for quite a long time, and it's finally time I give it the chance it deserves. This bestselling Ukrainian novel has raging reviews, being described by booktuber "rincey reads" as “This book is like Harry Potter, but if it was written by Kafka.”. That description alone was enough to put Vita Nostra on top of my dark academia must reads of this year.

3 – The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release date: First published in July of 1890, the novel-length version was published in April 1891

Favourite quote: “There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.”

Our story begins with Basil Hallward painting the portrait of his friend Dorian Gray, with whom he is infatuated, and, on the same day, introducing him to Lord Henry Wotton. The latter opens Dorian to his hedonistic worldview and to brings awareness to our main character that his beauty will soon fade. This prompts Dorian to wish that the picture, instead of him, will age and fade away. As our main character is drawn into a life of crime and gross sensuality, his body remains perfectly young and beautiful while his portrait grows day by day into a hideous record of evil, which he keeps hidden from the world

A recent read for me (I know, I’m very late to the hype) it’s not hard to see why the only work by Oscar Wilde is as massively adored. A perfect depiction of hedonism, the love for the aesthetic, the purpose of art and the superficial nature of society, The Picture of Dorian Gray was a quick and magnetic read.

2 – Babel: Or The Necessity Of Violence An Arcane History Of The Oxford Translators' Revolution

Author: R. F. Kuang

Release date: 23rd of August 2022

“An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.”

The story starts in 1828, and our protagonist Robin Swift, a Chinese boy that became an orphan by cholera in Canton, arrives to London with Professor Lovell. Robin is trained for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, so one day he can enrol in Oxford University's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel, the centre of translation and silver-working, or the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars. With the progression of his studies, Robin discovers that serving Babel might inevitably mean that he’ll betray his motherland, as he gets caught between his university and the Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion.

A very recent release, but already a hit, this novel by the author of the acclaimed The Poppy War, is on top of my TBR list.

1 - The Secret History

Author: Donna Tartt

Release date: September 1992

Favourite quote: “Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.”

A classic, and for a reason, The Secret History is the epitome of dark academia. With its inverted structure where you start by learning that Richard, the narrator, and his friends just killed someone and then get to know the events that led to that tragic ending. It’s impossible to leave out Donna Tartt’s first novel from my list. This is a completely biased story, as the first sentence from the book states, our narrator has a “longing for the picturesque”, a desire to see things as beautiful. This statement marks the beat of the book and through Richard’s romantic descriptions, and Tartt’s masterful use of words, you can’t help but imagine what it would be like to be a part of a group that spends their afternoons studying Greek, reading, drinking and plotting the murder of a close friend.

With dark academia deriving from an idealised version of the higher education and academia, it’s almost impossible that the books mentioned won’t have common theme – the pursuit of knowledge – and these are my six recommendations for this fall. Have you read any of them? Do you ever any others? Let me know.