Warning: This column may contain spoilers for certain books and movies, specifically those assigned by our school system for reading. If you gave a crap about this warning, be sure to buy some bell-bottom pants or whatever it is that goobers like you do.

Some of the fondest memories of my life are of summer reading. My Dad, my brother and I would hike up to a nice, grassy hilltop or beach rich with tide pools, and after we ran out of beef jerky to feed the hermit crabs, we’d sit down and read the latest Harry Potter book. Unfortunately, school mandated books nearly always fail to endow me with the same sense of anticipation or joy. This isn’t due to a lack of quality-far from it; my summer reading this year was the post-apocalyptic duo of the imaginative and topical Oryx and Crake and the haunting The Road. It’s more because after reading these books, rather than anticipating finding another good read, I feel the urge to lie down and think “Wow, we as humans really suck”. Oryx and Crake, in addition to covering the complete extermination of mankind, also discusses the exciting “behind the scenes“ of live execution and child pornography. The Road, on the other hand, has a scene where a group of cannibals have captured dozens of people and stripped them naked and are harvesting their body parts for food and burning them at the stumps and that’s not even the most horrifying part. This type of material is hardly new for a student of my age. Below is a list of school mandated books that I‘ve had to read within the last seven years or so:

• Tangerine, which is about a blind kid who learns about the hopeless situation of poor Latino Tangerine farmers in Florida and that he’s blind because his brother spray painted his eyes just after he learned to walk
• Lord of the Flies, which is about a marooned band of children who soon form tribes, begin torturing each other, and kill Piggy for a seashell
• I can‘t remember the title for this one, which is about a teen who, in order to protect his social group’s exclusivity, forces another teen to inhale paint, putting him into a coma
• Jane Eyre, which is about a woman who falls in love with an older man who keeps his insane wife chained up in the attic, and is later reduced to caring for him when a fire leaves him blind and mutilated
• Mountains Beyond Mountains, which is about the disease-riddled, impoverished peoples of Haiti, Russia, and Peru, and why you are a lower human being than Paul Farmer
• Year of Wonders, which is about a village that quarantines itself during a plague outbreak and as a result all of its inhabitants either die or go insane
• All Quiet on the Western Front, which is about how World War I shot, stabbed, gassed, and otherwise killed millions and millions of innocent youths
• Night, which is about a young man’s experience surviving the Holocaust
• Island of the Blue Dolphins, Catherine, Called Birdy, and Dragon Wings, which suck

All of these books have two things in common, the first being that they are consistently good, ranging from passable (Year of Wonders) to required reading for every human being (Night), save for the last three, which should be kept away from Jack Bauer at all costs. The second thing is that they are all, without exception, depressing as s***. It seems that assigning far more depressing than lighthearted or even tonally neutral books is a fixation of the school system right now, which I think is a shockingly bad idea. Although these books teach important real-world lessons like “life sucks” and “seriously, stay away from your brother if he gets spray paint”, their depressing, heavy nature usually prevents much enjoyment from reading, which gives less incentive to read things like books and more incentive to read things like tweets. If I wanted to convince someone who had never seen a movie before in their life that movies were worth their time, I’d probably show them It’s a Wonderful Life, a powerful tale about the difference one man can make. The Power of One, another excellent movie, contains a similar message, but accomplishes it by having the bad guys pee on children and force oppressed South Africans to eat fecal matter. Similarly, Portal and God of War III are both superb games, but if I wanted to convince someone that games can be just as creative and artistic as film while being fun to boot, I’d probably try to get them hooked on a funny, clever mind-bending puzzler rather than a vengeful Spartan warrior’s quest to showcase realistic disembowelment physics and have sex with Aphrodite while you watch her handmaidens have sex with each other. And no, I’m not making that up.

I’m not saying that we should rebuild the curriculum around Bambi: The Novel-at least half of the books I’ve mentioned are worth reading-but my guess is that more students would look forward to reading if we made our books less mind-crushingly miserable. Watership Down is an excellent example of the type of book we could stand to see more often. Hazel must lead a ragtag group of vagabonds from their home, which was completely devastated, to find a new homeland, encountering ferocious beasts, deadly traps, and hazardous forces of nature on the way. What’s interesting is that Hazel and his friends are Rabbits, their home was wiped out by humans to build a new mall, and most of their hazards are things that a less fuzzy hero like Odysseus would scoff at. This book has literary merit (it deconstructs the fantasy genre by writing a Lord of the Rings-esque adventure, but about small animals, as well as providing a scathing critique of humanity‘s disregard for the environment) and is well written, but what I like most about it is how I don’t want to cry when I read it. This is because Watership Down, while still containing terrifying, sad, and simply gruesome scenes (rabbits fighting each other is way less adorable than it sounds), lets the audience decompress by containing several lighthearted scenes and letting its characters fight back against their situation rather than revel in hopelessness. Compare this to the father in The Road, whose weapon for the majority of the book is a suicide gun. With one bullet. For his prepubescent son.

Teachers, Zito, board members; whoever has the power to make decisions about the English curriculum, I implore you not to let this trend continue. And if it does, at least take my book into consideration for summer reading. It’s called The Struggle for Air, and it’s about Stumpy, a baby with lung cancer and no arms or legs (SPOILER: it doesn’t end well).