Remember how back in high school English class, your teacher would pull out some classic piece of literature, and then forcibly you and the rest of the class to slog through its endless morass of boring characters, humorous old-fashioned words and literary devices (some of which being the screw, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the toaster), so that by the time you were finally finished, you were convinced that any book over a hundred years old must have either been written by space aliens with an extremely sick sense of what constitutes good writing, or had been developed by some mad Victorian scientist with the intention of making high school students hate him; but then years later, whether out of boredom or curiosity, or merely the need to settle things with your own personal demons, you’d pick up the book again and discover to your delight that in fact it was altogether enjoyable and edifying to read once more, opening up as it did magical new vistas of understanding and appreciation of the fine art of English writing as well as being an adventure in learning(that was like, the longest sentence ever)?  Me neither.  Seriously, all the great works of literature I’ve enjoyed since high school were the ones we never looked at.  My conviction is that this is due to one of two things; either all English teachers are in fact from France, and secretly part of an international plot to make American kids hate English, in hopes that they will forsake their native tongue and start speaking French, of maybe just that English teachers are usually middle-aged women.  I mean, most of my favored classics are stuff that involves pirates, monsters, and monster pirates.  Everything we read in English class seemed to be about women named Madeline throwing themselves out windows for the love of Some Guy I Always Hated Named Edmund.  Neither Treasure Island nor Treasure Island vs. The Wolf Man, for instance, had Some Guy I Always Hated Named Edmund (or SGIAHNE, for short), and if they did, he must been considerate enough to fall overboard during the opening paragraph.

            WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!! So if, despite the fact that this book has been out for something like 300 years and even though you never wanted to read it before, you’ve suddenly been seized by a passionate yearning to go out and read it, don’t read any more here.  If you do, I’ll only give away the surprise ending, thus sapping your existence of all meaning and crushing you dearest dreams like a Siberian hamster beneath the merciless wheels of my minivan, leaving you a broken, empty shell of a human being, devoid of joy and bereft of social skills.  If, on the other hand, you don’t really want to read the book anyways, than bully for you!  Go right ahead and keep reading this blog, it’ll probably actually make you better than you are now.

            Which brings us to Wuthering Heights (How does one wuther, anyway?  It sounds mildly unpleasant at best).  Now, most people these days suppose that it was written back in the 19^th century.  Nothing could be further from the truth however.  It was in fact a brilliantly insightful piece of science fiction written back in the later days of the Byzantine Empire, imagining what awesome new scientific wonders would have been invented by the far-oof year of 1800 (for instance, they would have stopped putting two Os in “off”).  Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte, a crazy cat lady who lived in Yogi’s Haunted Cave at King’s Dominion with her two evil stepsisters.  All day long, they’d stir a big cauldron o’ evil, and pass around the one magical glass eye that allowed them to see.  In reading the book, should you ever be so unfortunate as to try, this will become all too obvious.

            The first thing you ought to remember about literature (okay, if it were really the first thing, I’d have written it about two paragraphs up) is that any book that takes place on a heath is to be looked upon as highly suspect of being a sucky romance novel.  Honestly, I don’t even know what a heath is, I suspect its some kind of a swamp, but with more angst and broken dreams.  Never, in all my experience, has a book started with the words, “There upon the heath, Captain Zlarg the pirate readied his flamethrower,” or “The heath was thrown into darkness as a great swarm of flying monkeys blotted out the sun and flang poop on the undead cyborg army below, ” or “’I wish I had a Heath Bar,’ Dick Cheney mused as he delivered an Xtreme Flying Tiger Uppercut to William Shatner, thus winning himthe Tri-Wizard Tournament and saving Christmas.  Again.”  No, books with a heath in them always start out describing a house of sorrows, and then spend the next 400 pages making you sorrowful for having picked up the book in the first place.

            The story is as follows:  A bunch of angsty people live on a heath.  One of them, a gypsy foundling named Heathcliff, is hated by everybody, just like Cher.  Everyone is miserable and dies.  Heathcliff dies for no apparent reason.  The three people who are actually left alive get married and are happy.  That’s pretty much the entire thing, in about 402 ½ pages less than it took Emily Bronte to write it.  Also, what kind of a name is Heathcliff for a guy who lives on a heath?  That’d be like calling me Whiteboy Suburbscliff, which might be kind of cool, but not really very original at all.

            So there you have it, Wuthering Heights in a paragraph or less, now do yourself a favor and go read something with a vampire and a submarine in it, like The Brothers Karamazov.