My Education

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, July 2013: You could say Susan Choi’s My Education is a novel of the academy, in which an impressionable graduate student has an affair with an older, charismatic professor; that’s a fair--if misleading and incomplete--description. My Education is more surprising than that because a) the professor with whom the heroine sleeps is not the one you might expect and b) the book is full of pithy observations you can’t stop nodding at, and writing you can’t help underlining. “You’re twenty-one! Do you know what I’d give to be that age again?” Regina’s older lover cries in exasperation. “Do you know what I’d give if you’d stop saying that?” Regina replies. Or: “We sprang into flight like the arrow released from the bow,” Choi writes, when the lovers are discovered nearly in flagrante. Full of brilliantly drawn supporting characters--Regina’s hippie stoner roommate who goes by his surname is a favorite--this sophisticated book is about sophisticated people who may be brainy about arts and letters but are closer to clueless when it comes to the complex affairs of the heart. --Sara Nelson