While most graduate students focus on the labor of reading for comps, compiling the reading lists themselves takes time and reflection. Most examiners will hand you a “core” list of books and tell you to nominate several dozen potential additions. Your discussions over what to add are your first opportunities to use comps to clarify your intellectual commitments—or weaknesses—and how you want to approach your field. Just as important, prepping your lists is about minimizing the risks of burnout. My advice is to be strategic and minimize your workload, but also be aspirational by considering the themes you want your future dissertation to explore.
Think Strategically
Your professors will often tell you comps is the last chance to read broadly before you get siloed into your subfield. Indeed, comps is a chance to try to come to grips with the forest of being an Americanist or an Africanist before you’re rooting around the trees of your dissertation topic. That said, you will be reading so much that you might be happy to never engage with debates over, say, Progressive Era temperance, ever again! My first advice, then, is to compile your lists in a way that can shave off a little of the workload here or there. Think strategically.
The most common advice people give for comps—and it is the best—is to stock your reading lists with books you have already read. Those 10 books from your “Race and Immigration” seminar can lighten the load of your “Modern U.S.” field list. What seemed like tedious historiography at the time of your “Atlantic History” seminar can now be repurposed for an “Early America” field. Realistically, though, this probably did not get you very far. You just added maybe thirty books spread across three or four lists. Great. You still need 270 more. Now what?
Now see if you can do a shared list with another graduate student. I benefited from taking comps at the same time as a friend in my cohort. We shared two of the same committee members who both let us make a shared list and do prep meetings together. We both let the other pick some the books from their specialty and brainstormed what else should be on them. Whether it was exchanging “wtf is this?” texts about a book or building off each other’s ideas when we met with our professor, our solidarity kept us sane. More realistically, it is good to have someone who can clarify the takeaway when you might have skimmed a bit too quickly. All of this is to say: if you can do comps with a partner, do it!
Your exam committee will have their own ideas about what should, or should not, be on your reading lists. It is a good idea to have conversations with them early. I had one committee member who rejected some of the books I initially proposed for a list. One member accepted journal articles, but another wanted only monographs. None of this was an issue for me because I started sending them draft lists in the Spring before my comps year. In the end, probably half of the books I read for comps were non-negotiables from the professor’s own list.
Your Relationship to Big Ideas
Whether reading alone or with a friend, use your comps to finally read the “Big Books” which (good or bad) hang over your field. See for yourself why those twentieth-century scholars still inform debates on your topic. Reading your field’s “Old Lights” will help you understand why subsequent scholarship seems focused on certain questions to the neglect of others. You will see the subtext of the debates in your field. For instance, I did not really understand the broader political and cultural stakes in different interpretations of enslaved resistance until I finally read the older claims by Kenneth Stampp and Eugene Genovese. To give a more positive example, reading foundational texts such as Benjamin Quarles’ The Negro in the American Revolution andW.E.B.Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction helped me realize how much modern scholarship owes to a previously marginalized Black historiographic tradition. Comps is the time to understand historiography beyond good book/bad book and see the diverse intellectual genealogies your own scholarship will join.
Indeed, comps are a good chance to find your “methodological” community as well . Your specific dissertation topic may only intersect with one reading list, but those research questions and approaches can shape any comps list (Clio and the Contemporary has published a piece on using your exam reading lists to inform your dissertation prospectus here). Your planned dissertation on seventeenth-century Native American diplomacy might benefit from scholarship on Indigenous performance and settler colonial archives appropriate for a “Global Twentieth Century” list. My own dissertation on enslaved people’s military labor in the American Revolution benefited from a Modern U.S. list full of books on how state power shaped race.
Organize
Once you have your lists together you can organize them into sub-sections for prep meetings with your committee members. Two of my professors had me simply group books chronologically in terms of topic, but the other professor wanted to see how I would group books thematically. Each professor generally expected me to discuss seven to ten books at a time.
However you compile your lists, you have a lot of reading ahead of you. Thankfully, you chose books which will make your comps year one of genuine preparation for the dissertation ahead. Now, put the coffee on, get comfortable, and best of luck!
Clio and the Contemporary 
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