<p>How about some novels about college, academics, or college-like education?</p>
<p>Rabelais, Gargantua
Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education
Owen Johnson, Stover at Yale
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Mary McCarthy, The Group (or any of its dozens of imitators)
Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversation in “The Cathedral” (or Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, or The Storyteller . . . Vargas Llosa has mined his college years quite a bit)
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Philip Roth, The Human Stain (or The Ghostwriter, or Goodbye Columbus – see Vargas Llosa, above)
David Lodge, Changing Places (or Nice Work)
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Dai Sije, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Lev Grossman, The Magicians
Javier Marias, All Souls
Rebecca Goldstein, 39 Arguments for the Existence of God
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah</p>