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ForAnne and Nie
Core Curriculum (Required Reading
INTRODUCTION 5
PART 1 13
Chapter #1: OTHELLO, William Shakespeare 15
Chapter #2: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, James Joyce 22
Chapter #3: WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Emily Brontë 35
Chapter #4: THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES,
Nathaniel Hawthorne 45
Chapter #5: THE WOMAN IN WHITE, Wilkie Collins 54
Chapter #6: BRAVE NEW WORLD, Aldous Huxley 61
Chapter #7: LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 73
Chapter #8: MADAME BOVARY, Gustave Flaubert 83
Chapter #9: PYGMALION, George Bernard Shaw 108
Chapter #10: THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES,
Agatha Christie 131
CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING)
PART 2 147
Chapter #11: MOBY-DICK, Herman Melville 149
Chapter #12: A MOVEABLE FEAST, Ernest Hemingway 171
Chapter #13: WOMEN IN LOVE, D. H. Lawrence 193
Chapter #14: "THE HOUSEBREAKER OF SHADY HILL," John Cheever 211
Chapter #15: SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, Tennessee Williams 230
Chapter #16: LAUGHTER IN THE DARK, Vladimir Nabokov 242
Chapter #17: THE SLEEPING BEAUTY AND OTHER FAIRY TALES, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch 254
Chapter #18: A ROOM WITH A VIEW, E. M. Forster 262
PART 3 277
Chapter #19: HOWL AND OTHER POEMS, Allen Ginsberg 279
Chapter #20: THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, William Shakespeare 293
Chapter #21: DELIVERANCE, James Dickey 311
Chapter #22: HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad 328
Chapter #23: ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, Ken Kesey 337
Chapter #24: ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, Gabriel García Márquez 346
Chapter #25: BLEAK HOUSE, Charles Dickens 361
Chapter #26: THE BIG SLEEP, Raymond Chandler 375
Chapter #27: JUSTINE, Marquis de Sade 385
Chapter #28: QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DEVIA MERULANA,
Carlo Emilio Gadda 403 Chapter #29: THINGS FALL APART, Chinua Achebe 413
CORE CURRICULUM (REQUIRED READING) 3
Chapter #30: THE NOCTURNAL CONSPIRACY, Smoke Wyannoch Harvey 426
Chapter #31: CHE GUEVARA TALKS TO YOUNG PEOPLE, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna 436
Chapter #32: "GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE," Flannery O'Connor 457
Chapter #33: THE TRIAL, Franz Kafka 460
Chapter #34: PARADISE LOST, John Milton 471
Chapter #35: THE SECRET GARDEN, Frances Hodgson Burnett 479
Chapter #36: METAMORPHOSES, Ovid 495
FINAL EXAM 509
Introduction
I had always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond—James Bond—you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began—with a wheeze."
Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 different cheeses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields—any kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision —no, the grave necessity—to take pen to paper and write about my childhood—most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater—came much sooner than I ever imagined.
It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much in the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.
I was wrong.
By the end of January, I again found myself awake in the dead of night, the hall hushed, dark, spiky shadows crouching in the edges of the ceiling. I had nothing and no one to my name but a few fat, smug textbooks like Introduction to Astrophysics and sad, silent James Dean gazing down at me where he was trapped in black and white and taped to the back of our door. I'd stare back at him through the smudged darkness, and see, in microscopic detail, Hannah Schneider.
She hung three feet above the ground by an orange electrical extension cord. Her tongue — bloated, the cherry pink of a kitchen sponge —slumped from her mouth. Her eyes looked like acorns, or dull pennies, or two black buttons off an overcoat kids might stick into the face