How My English Degree Ruined My Ability To Finish A Book

I know what you’re thinking. If anything, spending four years of my adult life and enveloping myself in thousands of pounds of debt should mean that I am one of the most proficient readers out there. Instead, I often find myself physically unable to finish a book.

I applied for English Literature for the same reason many other English scholars did; I loved reading, I relished embedding myself into worlds fictional and unknown, I was creative and quite frankly I couldn’t see myself being that great at anything else. While my UCAS personal statement was carefully crafted to include Hedda Gabler, The Colour Purple and Animal Farm to show that I’m Not Like Other Girls, I lamented the fact I couldn’t write about how I really loved cliché chick lit novels and devoured them on family holidays. Such a type of book did not fit the right criterion for successful university candidates – a topic I considered at length during a module specifically dedicated to romance novels in my third year. Those books had a grip on me like no other, and though I may read them back now and see them in a different light, I owe much of my passion for reading to them.

So, if I had no issue speeding through those chick lit novels, and somehow managed to drag myself through the entirety of Middlemarch in my second year, why is completing a book so arduous now I have graduated? I blame my degree and the pandemic. Having a course which wholly relies on your ability to read, analyse and contribute to conversations about a wide variety of texts changes your perception of reading. Reading was no longer an enjoyable pastime, but quite the opposite. Reading became my whole life, whether I liked it or not. I probably funded Audible singlehandedly for the best part of three months whilst I did a Victorian Literature module.

It was every waking hour, listening and reading to books simultaneously just to make sure they somehow stayed in my brain long enough so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in one of my Friday afternoon seminars. In the end, it wouldn’t really matter anyway as I would always have to scrape some sort of average comment together to submerge the echoing silence of the classroom because it made me feel so uncomfortable. This trait of mine remained at the core of every seminar I went to, eventually meaning that I began to worry people thought I was a know-it-all, despite the reality of it being that I could not stand silence.

Finishing books on time became the bare minimum. Where A-Levels required the completion of two books, one play and a selection of poems over the space of two years, university required this of me in one week. Needless to say, it took me a while to get into the swing of things. I know people complain about the lack of contact hours English students have compared to other courses, but we genuinely need that free time to try and finish all these books. And this didn’t just comprise of concentrated reading, sitting down with a book in hand – for me, audiobooks were the main way I actually managed to get all this reading done. With this being said, it is a shared experience among us students that our degrees zapped our ability to read for fun.

One of the most obvious reasons for this was the instinctive inclination to overanalyse every single thing about the book. Why have they chosen that for the title? What could it signify to the rest of the story? Why have they chosen to structure the story like this? Why have they chosen a first-person narrator and what could that mean about their reliability as a source? How was this book received by the public when it was first released? You get the gist. That mindset becomes ingrained into the brain of each and every literature student across the globe, and yes - it does ruin the experience of reading.

When the pandemic hit, my studies halted and we suddenly had an extraordinary amount of (restricted) lockdown free time, I thought it was a great opportunity to finally get around to reading all those books I’d shelved on my bookcase. Alas, this was a dream which was somehow impossible to fulfil. Lockdown made my concentration levels even worse. Reading for fun now became a chore which felt difficult to complete. Perhaps it was the continual unrest which came with the pandemic, meaning there was no achievable state of relaxation, even though logically, this was the perfect time to read. I remember it was the Spring that Sally Rooney’s Normal People was adapted into a BBC series, so I tried to give the book a go. Despite racing through the TV series, I barely made it past the first chapter. While I acknowledge that I may be one of few people who experienced this issue during that time, I cannot help but shake the strangeness of it all. This was everything I wanted, and yet my brain could not find the power to engross itself because of all the other anxiety-inducing things happening in the world. I resent my brain for that – think of how many novels I could have read in that time.

This issue even carried on once the world went a bit more back to normal; it took me a whole year to complete Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo alongside the final year of my undergrad. Again, the university-related books managed to slot back into an organised routine because I knew I had no choice. I still had a queue of partially read books waiting for me to return to them, which thus far has not been readdressed. I do wonder if it really is just me though, as I tend to do the same with TV programmes. I get so excited at the thought of another series that I end up ditching it for a brand new one, and the cycle continues. Though there are the usual culprits that I go through cycles with like Gossip Girl, which I am currently on the fifth rewatch or so, other shows don’t really stand a chance.

Now as I write this, I find myself in the same position once again. My MA is complete, I’m on the job hunt and back at home with free time. As it stands, I am less than 100 pages into Jamaica Inn, and just over a quarter of the way through The Secret History. I think you see how this is going to end.