Poor Mojo's Two Minute Hate

For as long as anyone can remember, well-meaning pedagogues have been sabotaging summer vacations by forcing high schoolers to read “Lord of the Flies,” “All the King’s Men” and “A Separate Peace.” These books may be the cornerstones of our civilization, but they’re certainly no fun. One reason the average American male reads only one book a year may be the emotional trauma suffered in trying to hack his way through “Wuthering Heights” at the age of 14. I myself have never recovered from going toe-to-toe with “The Return of the Native” as a teenager, not only because Thomas Hardy’s bleak vision and lugubrious prose made me feel bleak and lugubrious, but also because it was my first exposure to the boundless cruelty of which adults are capable.

If my teachers had had an ounce of human decency in them they might have assigned us “Macbeth” or Caesar’s “Gallic Wars,” figuring that the merry carnage would at least hold the boys’ interest for a while. Or they could have saddled us with “The Stranger,” which had the mitigating charm of being glib and pretentious and would thus have kept the kids who were obviously going to end up at Bard happy. But by insisting that we write a full report on an uncompromisingly depressing 19th-century novel by a writer who never allowed a single ray of sunshine to brighten his work, the powers-that-be at Cardinal Dougherty High School were merely taunting the student body.