no subject

[taimatsu]

Grab the nearest book.
Open the book to page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
Don’t you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

The nearest book doesn't have a page 123 - it's a Penguin Great Ideas abridged edition of St Augustine's Confessions of a Sinner, and it goes up to page 114.

Instead, you get the book beneath it:

'There is always a risk that I'm going to get caught. I think that most of my women colleagues know I'm gay, and there's not much I can do about that. Many of them are gay themselves, and those that aren't don't make an issue about it.'

-- from We can't even march straight: Homosexuality in the British Armed Forces by Edmund Hall, published 1995. The above is reported speech from a female army captain.

Comments

[hg253.livejournal.com]

'How many times have I asked myself: when is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing towards me over the uneven ground.'

From Times Arrow by Martin Amis

[chaosdeathfish.livejournal.com]

'Hello Gord.
It's alright. Not stopping.'

From 'V for Vendetta', the comic book. Which I *still* haven't read, although the film was fun..

[dystopiac.livejournal.com]

I read the first 15 pages or so of V and haven't gotten around to finishing it.

I read the first 2 volumes of Transmetropolitan, and now in terms of comics I'm hooked on it. I just want to read volume 3, rather than actually finishing V like I should.

Or writing my dissertation like I really should. ;-)

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

"If it please your majesty," said Athos, bowing to the king, "yes, I will go, Sire."

From The Vicomte de Bragelonne, marginally the closest this time. It's possible Ur of the Chaldees was physically closer, but there are things in the way and I did that one last time.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

The nearest book doesn't have sentences (it's the A-Z). The second nearest book only has 86 pages (Eliot's The Rock). So, from the third nearest book:

"Everything's white and empty and there's no noise but the wind. In the old days the snow would drift up to the eaves of the roofs, and people would be trapped in their houses and starve to death. They wouldn't be found until spring."

A small prize for identifying the book, which is known to you.

[taimatsu]

It makes me think of "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

It's The Secret History, I'm afraid.

page 123 of 'The I-Ching on Love'

[cat-catalyst.livejournal.com]

"Reality also encompasses those feelings which are not easy to reconcile, but the process of comprehension involves a difficult transcendence of mere aesthetics, to the realm of creative art which endures in time as opposed to the transient art of fad & fashion."

from 'Aesthetics' on page 123 of 'The I-Ching on Love' by Guy Damien Knight