Sophie’s Exhaustive Dark Academia List

For a while now, since my dark academia rec list was such an unexpected success, I’ve wanted to create a list of all the dark academia books I’m personally aware of, regardless of whether I have already read them, as sort of a resource for the community. I have now done just that!

The titles in bold are the ones I have read. The ones I would especially recommend (which, okay, yeah, are almost all of the ones I’ve read) are in bold and italics. Note that this doesn’t mean I loved absolutely everything about the recommended book, just that I think it was good or worth reading overall.

If anybody is aware of a dark academia read that didn’t make the list, please leave a comment and I’ll update the list! Thank you! And thank you to everyone who has already recommended titles to me, helping me compile this list! :)

Also, just to be clear: My personal definition of dark academia would be a story that is set at a school or university or focuses heavily on academia otherwise (maybe the characters are in a secret book or debate club, discuss academic topics, something like that) and in which something bad or dark happens. This could be a crime (violent or non-violent), an accidental death, something supernatural going on… Note: Some of the books on the list (meaning of those I haven’t read) might only fit a looser definition of dark academia, e.g. maybe they have a dark subject matter and include some intellectual elements, even if the setting isn’t actually an academic institution.

And now, without further ado, enjoy!! As I said, I hope this will be a good resource for the dark academia community! And I want to update this list regularly so that it’s as exhaustive as possible! :)

A Beautiful Doom (Laura Pohl)

Academy Gothic (James Tate Hill)

Ace of Spades (Faridah Abike-Ayimide)

A Fatal Inversion (Barbara Vine)

A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Holly Black)

A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray)

A Lesson in Vengeance (Victoria Lee)

An Education in Ruin (Alexis Bass)

A Question of Holmes (Brittany Cavallaro)

A Separate Peace (John Knowles)

As Good As Dead (Holly Black)

A Student of History (Nina Revoyr)

A Study in Charlotte (Brittany Cavallaro)

All Summer in a Day (Ray Bradbury)

As I Descended (Robin Talley)

Bad Habits (Amy Gentry)

Black Chalk (Christopher J. Yates)

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Bunny (Mona Awad)

Cat Among the Pigeons (Agatha Christie)

Catherine House (Elisabeth Thomas)

Different Class (Joanne Harris)

Dismantled (Jennifer McMahon)

D.O.G.S. (M. A. Bennett)

For Your Own Good (Samantha Downing)

F.O.X.E.S. (M. A. Bennett)

Gaudy Night (Dorothy L. Sayers)

Gentleman and Players (Joanna Harris)

Girlhood (Cat Clarke)

Give Me Your Hand (Megan Abbott)

Good Girl, Bad Blood (Holly Black)

Good Girls Lie (J. T. Ellison)

Hex (Rebecca Dinerstein Knight)

House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)

How We Fall Apart (Katie Zhao)

If We Were Villains (M. L. Rio)

In My Dreams I Hold A Knife (Ashley Winstead)

Kill All Your Darlings (David Bell)

Killing November (Adriana Mather)

Miss Pym Disposes (Josephine Tey)

Murder Scholastic (Janet Caird)

Ninth House (Leigh Bardugo)

Party Girls Die in Pearls (Plum Sykes)

Peace Breaks Out (John Knowles)

People Like Us (Dana Mele)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Joan Lindsay)

Private (Kate Brian)

Shadow of the Lions (Christopher Swann)

Sleepwalking (Meg Wolitzer)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics (Marisha Pessl)

S.T.A.G.S. (M.A. Bennett)

Summer Sons (Lee Mandelo)

The Basic Eight (Daniel Handler)

The Bellweather Revival (Benjamin Wood)

The Book and the Brotherhood (Iris Murdoch)

The Case for Jamie (Brittany Cavallaro)

The Club (Takis Würger)

The Deceivers (Kristen Simmons)

The Devil Makes Three (Tori Bovalino)

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (E. Lockhart)

The End of Mr. Y (Scarlett Thomas)

The Furies (Katie Lowe)

The Furies (Natalie Haynes)

The Girls Are All So Nice Here (Laurie Elizabeth Flynn)

The Hand on the Wall (Maureen Johnson)

The Ivies (Alexa Donne)

The Lake of Dead Languages (Carol Goodman)

The Last of August (Brittany Cavallaro)

The Lessons (Naomi Alderman)

The Likeness (Tana French)

The Lying Game (Ruth Ware)

The Maidens (Alex Michaelides)

The Mary Shelley Club (Goldy Moldavsky)

The Night Climbers (Ivo Stourton)

The Orchard (David Hopen)

The Secret History (Donna Tartt)

The Secret Place (Tana French)

The Shadow Year (Hannah Richell)

The Swallows (Lisa Lutz)

The Truants (Kate Weinberg)

The Vanishing Stairs (Maureen Johnson)

The Wave (Morton Rhue)

The Wishing Game (Patrick Redmond)

The Wyndham Case (Imogen Quy)

The Year of the Gadfly (Jennifer Miller)

These Violent Delights (Micah Nemerever)

They Never Learn (Layne Fargo)

They Wish They Were Us (Jessica Goodman)

T.I.G.E.R.S. (M. A. Bennett)

Truly Devious (Maureen Johnson)

Trust Exercise (Susan Choi)

White Ivy (Susie Yang)

Without Anette (Jane B. Mason)

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dark academia list of books so I can start on some over the summer

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I believe in free education, one that’s available to everyone; no matter their race, gender, age, wealth, etc… This masterpost was created for every knowledge hungry individual out there. I hope it will serve you well. Enjoy!

FREE ONLINE COURSES (here are listed websites that provide huge variety of courses)

Alison

Coursera

FutureLearn

open2study

Khan Academy

edX

P2P U

Academic Earth

iversity

Stanford Online

MIT Open Courseware

Open Yale Courses

BBC Learning

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Carnegie Mellon University OLI

University of Reddit

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TED

FORA

Big Think

99u

BBC Future

Seriously Amazing

How Stuff Works

Discovery News

National Geographic

Science News

Popular Science

IFLScience

YouTube Edu

NewScientist

DIY & HOW-TO’S (Don’t know how to do that? Want to learn how to do it yourself? Here are some great websites.)

wikiHow

Wonder How To

instructables

eHow

Howcast

MAKE

Do it yourself

FREE TEXTBOOKS & E-BOOKS

OpenStax CNX

Open Textbooks

Bookboon

Textbook Revolution

E-books Directory

FullBooks

Books Should Be Free

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Project Gutenberg

AudioBooks For Free

LibriVox

Poem Hunter

Bartleby

MIT Classics

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Open Textbooks BCcampus

Open Textbook Library

WikiBooks

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES & JOURNALS

Directory of Open Access Journals

Scitable

PLOS

Wiley Open Access

Springer Open

Oxford Open

Elsevier Open Access

ArXiv

Open Access Library

LEARN:

1. LANGUAGES

Duolingo

BBC Languages

Learn A Language

101languages

Memrise

Livemocha

Foreign Services Institute

My Languages

Surface Languages

Lingualia

OmniGlot

OpenCulture’s Language links

2. COMPUTER SCIENCE & PROGRAMMING

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Programmr

GA Dash

CodeHS

w3schools

Code Avengers

Codelearn

The Code Player

Code School

Code.org

Programming Motherf*?$%#

Bento

Bucky’s room

WiBit

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Mozilla Developer Network

Microsoft Virtual Academy

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Learning Yoga

Learn Meditation

Yome

Free Meditation

Online Meditation

Do Yoga With Me

Yoga Learning Center

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Exposure Guide

The Bastards Book of Photography

Cambridge in Color

Best Photo Lessons

Photography Course

Production Now

nyvs

Learn About Film

Film School Online

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Enliighten

Ctrl+Paint

ArtGraphica

Google Cultural Institute

Drawspace

DragoArt

WetCanvas

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Music Theory

Teoria

Music Theory Videos

Furmanczyk Academy of Music

Dave Conservatoire

Petrucci Music Library

Justin Guitar

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Piano Lessons

Zebra Keys

Play Bass Now

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Investopedia

The Chess Website

Chesscademy

Chess.com

Spreeder

ReadSpeeder

First Aid for Free

First Aid Web

NHS Choices

Wolfram Demonstrations Project

Please feel free to add more learning focused websites.

*There are a lot more learning websites out there, but I picked the ones that are, as far as I’m aware, completely free and in my opinion the best/ most useful.

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buy me a coffee

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youtube channel I love her entire theres a space because I forgot how to spell channel

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𝙢𝙚𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨:

1. empty perfume bottles

2. abandoned castles

3. pressed flowers

4. smell of soil after rain, Petrichor

5. old books with dust all over them

6. walking all alone in a museum hall

7. languages that humanity no longer uses

8. stars, the moon, the entire universe and it’s secrets

9. old paintings

10. late night conversations

11. thunderstorms

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13. gothic architecture

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20. enjoying peaceful silence

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friend: you look stressed me: haha yeah it’s the stress

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