Either/Or by Elif Bautman

I remain a fan of the coming-of-age novel, which is ironic because on the one hand I am way closer to the end of my life than the beginning of it--my kids are no longer coming of age either--and on the other because on some levels I am still grappling with what I want to do with my life. At least at this moment I am close enough to retirement age that it can be seen as a planning for that life transition, but truly, I have always been searching. Selin Karadağ is a teenage would-be writer who arrives at Harvard in 1995 ready to meet challenging, meaningful people, and fairly unprepared for what that entails. She is from an immigrant family, the first of them to be born on American soil, and there is an undercurrent of that and how it shaped her world view that underlies the book. Over the course of her freshman year, she is greeted by a constant fluctuation of banalities and revelations, and the odd and sometimes intense relationships that she forms. I found her to be a dryly funny and observant character; even her powerful, confusing attraction to one of her professors is described with a kind of matter-of-factness that expresses her mystification well. Being a freshman in college is like this: Too much random stuff happens for anything to accrue meaning — yet. The book is breezy, deceptively light in tone, and leaving you with things to think about.