-As I Lay Dying

-Middlemarch

-Blood Meridian

-Bleak House

-Sound and the Fury

-Lolita

-King Lear

-The Road

-Off Season (purely for most excruciatingly perfect and horrific genre writing--maybe the only horror novel I've read that genuinely scared me, and no reason not to include multiple rape cannibal books on my list)

-Something Wicked This Way Comes

-The Atrocity Exhibition (but I think the other works I've listed are better than that--but this is the one that's the most pure catnip just for me)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48108097)

Moby-Dick by Melville

Disgrace by Coetzee

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48108099)

mobydick is very good

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48108179)

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48109121)

"Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her...Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.

The proposed solution to what the telecommunications industry’s psychological consultants termed Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria (or VPD) was, of course, the advent of High-Definition Masking... i.e. taking the most flattering elements of a variety of flattering multi-angle photos of a given phone-consumer and — thanks to existing image-configuration equipment already pioneered by the cosmetics and law-enforcement industries — combining them into a wildly attractive high-def broadcastable composite of a face..."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48109346)

Renada Deshada's uchicago screed

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5597649&forum_id=2#48109399)