Dark Academia Booklist
Dark academia is an aesthetic that revolves around classic literature, the arts, philosophy, and the overall devotion to self-improvement, and knowledge. By focusing on the dark side of academia, the content references death, mortality, and morality. The focus on good vs. evil, and the gray area in life.
Classics
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Inferno by Dante
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Macbeth by Shakespeare
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Shakespeare Tragedies
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy
Murder on The Orient Express By Agatha Christie
Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Maurice by E. M. Forster
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Blood Meridian and Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
Kafka on the Shore and Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Edgar Allen Poe (The Tall Tale Heart, Annabelle Lee, Masque of the Red Death, and The Raven)
Philosophy
Plato
Aristotle
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel
Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
On What We Owe to Each Other by T.M Scanlon
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
Mythology
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
Medea by Euripides
Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Grendel by John Gardner
Modern Novels
Bunny by Mona Awad
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
A Secret History by Donna Tartt
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Catherine House by Elizabeth Thomas
Vicious by V.E. Schwab
A Discover of Witches by Deborah Harkness
Dead Poets Society by N. H. Kleinbaum
The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman
The Bellwether Revivals by Benjamin Wood
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Neverwhere and Ocean’s at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman