Back to school calls for freshers’ flu alongside 9am lectures in comfy clothes, but with this comes a warm nostalgia as leaves start to fall and our brains switch back on. This time of year always catches me reminiscing on my teenage back-to-school days, and the autumn memories of literature lessons in a freezing classroom.
While not always successful, school curriculums attempted to encourage a passion for literature, and so I’ve been looking back on the books chosen to inspire young readers, and their re-readability nowadays. Classic authors such as Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens, and Malorie Blackman wrote inspiring novels fundamental to young minds. Multi-layered books like Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird provided many first examples of the lessons fiction can teach about society.
However, the more nostalgic, personal books read in school are the ones that stick with us in adulthood. The twisting, terrible delights of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline follows the young protagonist’s adventures through the mystical Pink Palace and the eerie alternate world she discovers. Here she must avoid the kidnapping of her soul through the button-eyes of the Other Mother and save the lost children from succumbing to the same fate. Coraline’s loneliness and new-home nerves may feel familiar to readers at this time of year, but hopefully we won’t all discover an alternative reality of button-eyes and talking cats as we re-enter academic life. Hitting play on the blues and purples of the 2009 movie adaptation always whisks me back through the secret door to my 11-year-old self in her English classroom, hearing the winding plot of this story unfurl.
Similar to Coraline, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe encapsulates the childhood wonder and curiosity encouraged in school literature classes. Accompanied by another excellent movie adaptation, this story pulls readers through another secret door to the winter wonderland of Narnia, populated by talking animals and ruled by the tyrannical White Witch, awaiting the salvific return of the true ruler Aslan. Alongside creative religious symbolism, this novel helps romanticise the darker, colder nights of back to school through the perpetual winter mystique of Narnia.
As deadlines reappear and library days get longer, stories like these represent the magical nostalgia of back to school. If you’re already feeling the stress of the autumn semester, I’d recommend a dive back into the fantastical fiction of our teens, a reminder of academic days past.
Photo by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash
