Mr. Misting

Cut a hand sized hole in an industrial microwave. While holding a large firework, insert desired arm into the hole, then seal the edges between arm and hole with a copious amount of duct tape. Get high on pain meds. Start microwave for 99:59 minutes. (If body distribution of heat begins to feel fatal, remove the limb with a sharp-edged implement. Bowie knives, sporks or chainsaws are recommended. Make sure to leave enough arm attached to microwave so the seal holds.) Sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

Basically yes. Though this question is meant to be more about what your college class would be like, and not what books should be taught in all classes. Hopefully that this ends up being more interesting than "what are your favorite books?" For example, I chose Nightwatch by Pratchett, which is an incredible and deep book, though I wouldn't be likely to recommend anyone else teaching it, but I personally would so love to dive into the symbolism and the meaning and language of that book. That anthology sounds fascinating. I'll need to get to that. And Shadows Below, I've read that collection but didn't consider how it would work for this question. But yeah, I could imagine the value in teaching writing very high. I didn't consider the danger of people SparkNoting a book. I guess if you had daily quizzes about smaller details or quotes a teacher could discourage that. But I do think many classics can be challenging, maybe not for the thoughts they present, but for the ways in which they are written. Reading Moby Dick was a very interesting experience for me because much of the book I didn't understand what people were saying because of the prose. I had to read many paragraphs two or three times and think about it before I understood what it was saying, and eventually I got better and quicker at following conversations. Training my brain to understand more types of writing, and denser writing, I hope is training me to think better and pick up more detail when I then read other books.

Four is an arbitrary number, but I structured the question as I did so it would force people to make interesting decisions, as parameters breed creativity and such. I know college classes would have a theme, and have many more books, but I choose college as a framework for the question, so the answerer wouldn't have to worry about banned books or books being too long or hard to read. I also didn't specify a theme for the books because that allowed people to pick books I never would have even considered, like graphic novels or very recent commercially oriented works, which lead to me requestioning the purpose and goal of reading books for education. And I've added many books to my reading list because of this question, as it is high praise for someone to put a book on such a short list, as they think the books so meaningful among all the books they've read, or a book they would really love to dissect and better understand. I am much less to impressed read chosen books the longer someone's list goes, though Treamayne, I am always appreciative to the incredible detail you bring to discussions like these. But if you had to slim down your list--to maybe not four, if you still consider that too small, but a more compact list--what books do you think have impacted you the most, and/or could help others learn the most from? Magi, that's a really good list. I hadn't considered Outsiders, though I remember reading it and liking it a lot. I almost chose Gatsby, and shakespeare, but put them aside because I assumed most high schoolers got to them, and I thought it more important to expose students to other literature then drill down on what they've already read.

I've been throwing this question around to my friends and teachers, and been very interested by the answers: you're a college professor teaching college literature, and can pick any four books you've read to teach. You can pick books with no restrictions, as long as you think it will provide the best class experience. My current list is Moby Dick, Lonesome Dove, Nightwatch by Terry Pratchett and The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. I've also had many thoughts about the nature of reading books in class from this question: Is it better to read challenging classics that push people's thoughts or modern books people will enjoy? What should be the goal of reading novels in class? Is a graphic novel literature? Is a graphic novel or non-fiction appropriate to read in English classes? How far should we go to include diversity in authorship, if it's hard to find books written by those minorities that the teacher loves? (All my books are by white guys, the books I considered and loved by women didn't fit the bill as for a few reasons (I'm going to read more books women and non-white people after this (any suggestions?))) So, what books would you guys pick to read and why, and any thoughts about my questions?

Correct

Sliced up stacks of corpses that are branded with people's thoughts

Ok, given that you didn't put a cost on giving a curse, or a distance limit on to who I can put curses on, there are a lot of ways to break this power. The way I would probably do it is send a letter to a rich person with an ultimatum. For each day I don't get x amount of money, I give them a curse that will last forever. If I do this to maybe a 100 people, at least a few will cave to avoid have an ever-increasing number of slightly annoying things, and I'll be rich as long as the law doesn't catch me. Or am really mad at an army, or one person trying to fight me, I can spam give them curses, say two million curses to the entirety of the army until, given the number of slightly annoying things they are not very effective at fighting. You have the power to mentally inflict paper cuts onto people, but for each cut you give you get one as well.

I put a very distinct speck of dust into a bullet, and command that dust to shoot forward. While the increased size would make it lose a lot of acceleration, I'd still hazard that it'd be lethal. Alternatively, based on what a paint flake did the International Space Station (cracked their crazy expensive window), even if the speck of dust is moving roughly 7 times slower than the impact of space station to paint, I think a human skull is 7 times weaker than ballistic space windows. So, grab a handful of dust and machine gun everything. You have a single basic spiral notebook that you have perfect knowledge of everything on its pages.

After some very cursory reading of my AP psych textbook, I think it would be really horrific if I made an invisible incorporeal sphere fly into someone's eye, past the lens, and then have it turned up to a lightbulb level of light. Since the iris, pupil, Corena and lens help modulate, focus and control all entering light, I don't think the person's eye could handle if light turned on past those protections. I'm not sure if it would cause instant blindness, but it would probably, best case scenario for them, make that eye useless or very weird for at least a minute. Repeat with another eye and they are theoretically blind long enough for the user to easily destroy them in a fight. Ability to hear sneezes seven seconds before they happen.

Proof: learning of the future is obviously of Odium. The power loves arguments and questions, though the Rayse hates questions and tries to shut them down by RAFOing them. Theory: Mare was Lift

And little Ajax will stay back

Your families wonder where you've been