I chose the M*A*S*H story because it's one short, self-contained story that doesn't occur mostly off-page over the course of 1300 pages (I was going to make this point in my original post, damn you, concerted-effort-to-be-more-concise-in-my-posts), but yeah, the Hal bits in the last couple hundred pages are pretty…

I think there's approximately 7 billion people who would not only think that it's okay to go by the name "Andrea Battleground", but would actually assert that it's an unambiguously cool name.

It most definitely counts, and congratulations, you earn my (completely meaningless) vote for the correct answer to "What is the single greatest fictional descent into madness?"

I don't think I've ever cringed so thoroughly at a cartoon.

@avclub-41e23e24ee2670c4128cd7e5e5ee42ab:disqus Oh, OK.  I thought he must have made some nonsensical claim about Green Eggs and Ham being some sort of parable extolling the virtues that the far right stands for.

Please, tell us more about how Faulkner obviously sucks, and how, like, no one fucking talks like Shakespeare anymore, so why should you have to read a gay fucking play like Hamlet for Ms. Smith's junior English class when you could be pwning noobs on Modern Warfare right now.

Wait, this is a joke, right?  Because I haven't seen it, and knowing James Franco, he'd probably be pretentious enough to think that surreally revealing Darl's corpse in Addie's coffin during some sort of dream sequence would be incredibly profound.

God fucking damn that guy.  Is there anybody alive as fucking pretentious as James Franco?

@avclub-62812d8eb06386505986efff8b5e43ac:disqus I'd personally suggest The Road as the ideal starting place for McCarthy.  No Country for Old Men reads a bit too much like a film script (which is what McCarthy originally planned it to be).
Also, is there any living author as incredible at creating indelible imagery as…

Wait, what's the story here?

"I guess the temperature in here is regulated by vents that blast extremely hot and extremely cold air at different intervals."

Sex House might just be The Onion's greatest ever accomplishment.  It delved into the very depths of creepy and then somehow became legitimately horrifying during the "reunion" finale.  "How's the baby?"  "I honestly have no idea…I'm much more focused on my blogging career right now."

Also, Theon's loss of identity in the books of ASOIAF is easily the most fucking terrifying thing in the series to date.

I'll go with the story of Hugh Steeply's M*A*S*H-obsessed father from Infinite Jest.  It's pretty much the perfect combination of a profoundly sad, and comically absurd but yet disturbingly plausible descent into madness.

@avclub-0108709d613bc1d1db7e5c2b5f02c657:disqus Sorry to respond a day after your comment, but as someone who is painfully cognizant of the moral dilemma of being a fan of a sport that causes profoundly debilitating head injuries, I think about this kind of stuff a lot.  So anyway.  As far as the NHL dealing with…

http://www.theonion.com/art…  
Yeah, I thought this Onion article was much funnier commentary on the Nobels, and actually made some sense.

I haven't read it and hence can't speak to whether I do in fact find it incredibly boring, but 1Q84 wasn't exactly universally lauded, was it?  Could that be doing anything to hurt Murakami's chances with the Nobel committee?

Not nearly on the same level as Atwood and Munro, but Yann Martel is Canadian, right?

Yeah, when you have a prog lyricist as unsubtle as Peart dealing with a poet as heavy handed as Coleridge, it makes for some pretty supremely cheesy lyrics.  "Xanadu" is still a fucking great song though, probably the best classic rock adaptation of eighteenth century poetry out there.

@avclub-95d952510e02ffba7fa228e4d43866cb:disqus So what you're saying is, Cormac McCarthy had better hope he has a couple more decades ahead of him.