Is this a real life?
Is this bad fantasy?
Stuck reading novels
From the 19th century.
Open the books,
Come take a look and see:
I'm just a poor boy, I need your sympathy,
Because it's hard to get, my brain's gone dead,
Not much in my great big head,
Everything these critics said, does it really matter to me?
To me...

Mama,
Can't write a word,
Put my pen upon the page,
Held it there almost an age...

Mama,
I have just begun,
But now I've gone and found new stuff to read...

Mama (ooh ooh oooh),
Didn't mean to read no more,
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow,
Search the stacks, search the stacks, rescue me...

Too late, my time has come,
Prospectus due today,
Still on the very first page.

Goodbye, everybody, I've got to go,
My adviser's going to kill me with a spike

Mama (ooh ooh ooh),
I don't want to die,
Sometimes wish I'd never been born at all...

I see a bookshelf full of heavy books
Middlemarch! Middlemarch! Will he marry Dorothea?
Uncle Tom and Eva,
Jane Eyre's quite the diva,
Boz!

Charlie Dickens? Charlie Dickens!
Charlie Dickens? Charlie Dickens!
Charlie-Dickens' Chuzzlewit--and Sairey Gamp!

I'm just a poor boy reading Thomas Carlyle...
(He's just an old guy with an icky prose style,
And sexist, racist, xenophobic, everything that's vile.)

Dickens, Bronte, Eliot, will it ever end?
Vic-tor-ia! No, never will it end--let it end!
Vic-tor-ia! No, never will it end--let it end!
Vic-tor-ia! No, never will it end--let it end!
Never will it end--let it end!
Never will it end--let it end!
No, no, no, no, no no!
Victoriana, Victoriana, Victoriana, let it end!
The library has a carrel set aside for me,
For me,
For me!

It all really matters,
Anyone can see,
It all really matters,
But it might be fatal,
To me.