Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Back to School

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda
Author: Becky Albertalli
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Publishing Date: 2018
No. of Pages: 343

Synopsis: 

Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: If he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing with, will be jeopardized.

With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out – without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.

Title: Young Gerber
Author: Friedrich Torberg
Translator (from German): Anthea Bell
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Publishing Date: 2012 (1958)
No. of Pages: 349

Synopsis: 

Young Kurt Gerber embarks hopefully on his last year at school, facing the all-important final exam. However, he soon clashes with his sadistic new form teacher, Professor Kupfer, known to his students as “Lord God Kupfer” – with tragic consequences.

Based in part on the story of ten pupils who committed suicide in a single week in Vienna in the winter of 1929, this classic of European literature is powerful and timeless tale of classroom angst.

Title: Beartown
Author: Fredrik Backman
Translator (from Swedish): Neil Smith
Publisher: Washington Square Press
Publishing Date: February 2018 (2016)
No. of Pages: 415

Synopsis: 

A tiny community deep in the forest, Beartown hasn’t been the best at anything in a long time. But down by the lake stands an old ice rink. And, in that ice rink, Kevin, Amat, Benji, and the rest of the town’s junior ice hockey team are about to compete in the national semifinals – and they actually have a shot at winning. All the hopes and dreams of this place now rest on the shoulders of a handful of teenage boys.

Under that heavy burden, the semifinal match becomes the catalyst for a violent act that will leave a young girl traumatized and a town in turmoil.

This is a story about a town and a game, but even more about loyalty, commitment, and the responsibilities of friendship; the people we disappoint even though we love them; and the decisions we make every day that come to define us. In this story of a small forest town, Fredrik Backman has found the entire world.

Title: Pnin
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

Synopsis: 

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: “A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.” Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. (Source: Goodreads)

Title: Lucky Jim
Author: Kingley Amis

Synopsis: 

A hilarious satire about college life and high class manners, this is a classic of postwar English literature.

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable. (Source: Goodreads)