A meme that is not a quiz, thankfully
There's a meme about books that's going around:
What you do is grab the nearest book, turn to page 56, and post the fifth sentence to your blog.
First, the proof:
This picture was taken after rotating about 120 degrees in my chair. The Kindle in the picture probably is a few inches closer than the rest of the books, but first, it's unclear that it's a book, and second, its ebooks don't have page numbers.
So I chose the book on top of the stack (not the Nintendo DS game case that's at the very top: that's The World Ends With You). The line reads as follows:
Events that do not command our attention hardly exist for us, even if they influence how we perceive, feel, or react.
It's from Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte. This book is made up mostly of quotes, so the line is actually a quote from another work, by Gerard Roth: The Quest to Find Consciousness.
(I've added the interactive-fiction tag to this post even though it has nothing to do with IF, so that my readers who only follow that tag will see it).
6 comments:
"Enterococcus columbae is specific for pigeons (57) and Enterococcus asini for donkeys (54)."
Truly gripping! :-)
- Mike (random IF reader)
Assuming I cam skip the atlas and dictionary that were closer, the closest book at the moment for me is The Spell of the Black Dagger by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Page 56, sentence 5 is:
They fed the father and son strength, drawing it from their own bodies--but to no avail.
-- DavidW from ifMud
Several books were equally close to me; I chose the only one English, because readers of this blog might find it easier to understand than Dutch or German. :)
"It is, therefore, better to put aside the appearance, on which we all agree, and to use the power of reason either to confirm its reality of reveal its fallacy."
The book is Against Method by Paul Feyerabend, but he is quoting Galileo's Dialogue. (Galileo is attempting to refute the "tower argument" against Copernicanism.)
OK, for me:
Eels are sliced down the back in Kanto, and down the belly in Kansai, further proof that these regions belong to very different culinary universes.
From "World Food: Japan", John Ashburne and Yoshi Abe. Sitting on my desk right next to my keyboard so it's pretty unambigously closest, though there are two other books within arm's reach.
(For context: I just got back from a 10-day Japan trip a couple days ago. Didn't bring the book on this trip but was looking to see if they had an intuitive way of sorting kanji for food words. I rarely end up ordering food that's only shown in kanji on the menu, 'cuz I can never be sure what I'm gonna get.)
Flour, which cost the government $570 a ton to get to Utah, was sold for $11 a ton.
As perhaps your only reader who also possesses that book, I'd just like to thank you again for it.
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