Admit it. You’ve all experienced that mind-numbing exercise of having to read a certain book. “It’s a classic, a pillar of our literary canon,” gushed the teacher while shoving one of August Strindberg’s works in our hands. (Swedish literary canon, obviously.) Or you were handed a dog-eared copy of 1984 and told this, this was manna for the soul. (I much preferred Animal Farm. “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.” A quote that, sadly, is as applicable today as w...