Stupid Stories They Make Us Read in College

Hello, my adoring fans!
Though few and far between you are, I want to tell you that I appreciate your support and feedback, so lemme have it!  ha!

Alrighty...originally I was just going to talk about this one particular story that was really stupid that I had to read in Introduction to Literature, but lucky for all of you, they gave a ANOTHER stupid story that I had to read, so I'll rant about both of them =D

The first story is called "The Call of Cthulhu" (Kuh-thoo-loo) written by H. P. Lovecraft.  I strongly urge you to NEVER read this story unless it is required of you for a class or if someone is threatening you at knife point (even then, I'm not convinced that it'd be worth it!)  Sure, the story is about monsters and the fate of the entire world, but it is like reading a 30 page court transcript of a custody battle...but with no dialogue.  That's right, there isn't a single quotation mark in the whole story.  I feel a little awful for saying this, but I think that Stephenie Meyer could have done a better job writing this story than Lovecraft did.  He made the story almost impossible to understand and there was NEVER an "aha!" moment for me.  I learned more about the story looking up videos on youtube and story summaries online.  If you want the story in a nut shell, check out THIS VIDEO.

The second story (which we discussed today in class) was called "The Last Days of Mohamed Atta" written by: Martin Amis.  This is a fictional story about one of the men who crashed into one of the towers on September 11th, 2001.  Let me just say... Martin Amis is a SICK individual.  He actually put himself into the mind of this murderer and made up the contents of his day from 4 A.M. till his eventual suicide/mass murder.  In this story, he talks a lot about his blatant disregard for women and compares one man's wife and daughter to "owning a truck."

Now keep in mind...THIS WAS A FICTIONAL STORY. Nothing except the actual plane crash happened.  The rest was made up.  This begs the question: what would compel a writer to want to know what they guy was thinking?  In my opinion, it doesn't matter what his motives were, or where his mind was at.  All that matters was what he did.  Oh, and here's the real kicker:  This story...was published in the New Yorker...yeah.  Amis also wrote a story from the mindset of a German doctor from World War II who experimented on Jews.  Yup...Amis is one sick puppy.

This brings up a couple questions in my mind: Who decides what "literature" is?  And who decides that college students should read it?  Whether the story is about a mass murderer, written by a man with a fascination for evil figures, or a story that has made secret cults, grizzly murders, and a squid-like demon king boring.  Why do they even bother making us read these things when EVEN THE TEACHER seems less than enthused by the whole notion?

As I looked around my literature class this week, I saw 3 people falling asleep and the girl next to me was practicing all of the different ways that she could scribble the word "boring" into her spiral notebook.
Something has gotta change.