A Sampling of My Books

5/22/2004 April

As incentive to get my book boxes unpacked, I decided to take up where Minnie left off and participate in a meme.

The Meme:

Take five books off your bookshelf.
Book #1 — first sentence
Book #2 — last sentence on page fifty
Book #3 — second sentence on page one hundred
Book #4 — next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
Book #5 — final sentence of the book
Make the five sentences into a paragraph.

Mind you, I’m using the first five books I take out of the first box I unpack.

The Paragraph:
Nature is the universe, Whitehead said. Just as he expected. Suppose this not totally unlikely state of affairs. But Mrs. Moore had fallen asleep, exhausted by the early start. These are the basic questions that we should ask of any place we wish to understand, whether it is near or far, mysterious or mundane.

The Books:

The Sierra Club Nature Writing Handbook by John A. Murray
Mumbo Jumo by Ishmael Reed
The Awakeners by Sheri S. Tepper
A Passage To India by E. M. Forster
Encyclopedia of Mysterious Places: the Life and Legends of Ancient Sites Around the World by Robert Ingpen and Philip Wilkinson (I didn’t count the Gazeteer or Bibliography as being part of the main content of the book)

And because I wasn’t quite satisfied with the results, I tried again with a second box of books. I tried to select only books of fiction this time because I doubt there are any full sentences in my tome of a French dictionary.

The Paragraph:
Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable. “Git up, now, and put supper on,” pa says. “There’s just something immoral about all of it.” He looked such an extraordinary object in this guise that, flurried as she was, she could not avoid laughing outright. But now the hour is late, and all of that is another tale, for another day.

The Books: