'Assonance means getting the rhyme wrong...'

Today I received my course handbook for the part time diploma in Creative Writing I'm starting in September.
Slap on the doormat it went, a slender A4 spiral-bound tome containing a recommended reading list of 168 books.

Yes 168!

I counted.

In a panic I emailed a friend who is also signed up for the course. She replied saying that yes, she has read most of the books at some time or other (damn, no sympathy there then).

I counted again. Just in case I had missed something. Out of the entire list of 168 books I have read 4.

FOUR books in my entire lifetime.

And 2 of those were 'how to write' type books, so I'm not even sure that they count.

What have I been doing with my life?(Obviously not reading the same books as everybody else.)
Even accounting for periods of drunkenness and periods of hangover recovery, surely I must have read more books on this list.

I read down the list:

Chekhov...Kafka....

And I'm there. I AM Julie Walters in 'Educating Rita':

["Suggest how you would resolve the staging difficulties "inherent in a production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt"
you have written, quote. "Do it on the radio. "Unquote.]

As if this wasn't bad enough (yeah it's bad enough), from week 6 we are 'doing' poetry.

POETRY.

POETRY.

poetry

Nope, writing it in different font doesn't make it any more attractive.

168 books in 8 weeks before the course starts...that makes it about 20 a week, or 3 a day (4 a day if you want weekends off). Yeah, no probs. I'll go get started now...