Third-year English Student Has Yet to Read Book

UI: the writing school, not the reading school

Third-year Creative Writing student Ethan Reed is mere weeks from completing his 5th semester of college classes and has not read a single book.

“Work smarter, not harder,” Reed told the Doily Allergen. “Like, I’m not reading Albert Camus. More like Albert Cam-poo, am I right?”

Despite his downright refusal of long-form reading, Reed maintains a 3.5 GPA in the English department. He insists that with an internet connection and access to ChatGPT, reading actual books is entirely obsolete—even managing to keep up with participation requirements. “I usually just bullshit something about the effects of capitalism, and my professors lap that up,” Reed said.

“I did read a few pages of Hamlet, until I realized it’s just a rip-off of The Lion King,” Reed told Doily when asked about his current Shakespeare class.

Reed asserts that he has not read a full book in all of college or high school, and that the last full book he read was one of the Warrior Cats books in third grade. “It was cool, but then Cinderpelt died, and that was like… Really fucked up.” Reed said through tears.

“Why would I ever read? I’m a Creative Writing major, not a Creative Reading major,” Reed said. When told that the Creative Writing major’s full title is English and Creative Writing, Reed remarked: “Yeah, I write in English.”

We attempted to interview sophomore Lauren Killinger, Reed’s classmate in fiction workshop, but she was so genuinely haunted when we brought up Reed’s name that we could not continue the interview in good faith.