Now that I am writing my Masters thesis on One Direction I have this niggling anxiety that I won't think about books any more, and that, at the end of my English degree, I still haven't read enough ‘‘important'' books.
I go through periods of feeling like Rory in Gilmore Girls when she visits Harvard and realises she hasn't read and can never read all of the millions of books the university has in its libraries.
I feel silly and inadequate and my palms itch when I think that maybe I just coasted through my adolescence and my degree without torturing myself with too many lengthy masterpieces. I know that this anxiety is completely ridiculous, that I have read a lot of books, and have thought in depth about more than I would normally care to think deeply about.
But I still lie awake at night worrying that someone will ask me about some seminal work, some literary canon essential and I will have to say that I haven't read it because I haven't read as many classics as everyone else and I'm still obsessively re-reading sections of the book I wrote my Honours dissertation on and I've been reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves for nine months.
The University of Otago only has two compulsory undergraduate classes, and while they cover a fair bit of ground I can't help wishing I'd been forced to take excruciating poetics classes, and literary history classes, where you learn to spot what's a biblical reference and what is actually about King Arthur.
I'm not really complaining, because throughout my degree I got to study mostly only what I am actually interested in, and honestly, I've talked big about what I don't care about reading almost endlessly. Sadly, in spite of being the one furiously complaining that there aren't enough women on the reading list, and raving about how the Western male perspective is not universal, it seems I'm still a little bit brainwashed.
The University of Otago didn't make me study too many longwinded, misogynistic treatises on the agony of man and his sexual frustration, but popular culture posited the idea that I should spend my time reading those books and I tacitly took it all on board.
I haven't read Henry Miller, Henry David Thoreau, or Henry James and while that might change if I ever have a spare few moments where I feel like I could try relating to a man a little more, I reasonably know I'm not really missing out.
If I need to drop something clever into a conversation I can just rifle through the hundreds of references I have stored up from books I've genuinely cared about and related to, even if they only have cult status. Or, I could say something about One Direction and continue to alienate the academic adults in my life.
I imagine it must be quite nice to be in a position where you actually want to read the collected works of Charles Bukowski, where you look forward to being truly moved by Joseph Conrad.
But, sadly, that's not where I am.
My position is stuck somewhere between stubbornly refusing to give in to the demands of the Western literary canon, and feeling immense guilt at my lack of knowledge about every book written.
Currently, I am paralysed by this conflict, but you might well bump into me stocking up on the old boys, even if it is just so I can engage in better-informed complaining.
●Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
