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Monday, December 1, 2008

What's on Page 56?

I've never posted a meme on my blog before, but this one involved playing with books, so an exception must be made.

Instructions for this meme:
(1) Grab the nearest book
(2) Open the book to page 56
(3) Find the fifth sentence
(4) Post the text of the next two to five sentences
(5) Don’t dig for your favorite book. Pick the closest.

The closest book to me when was on top of one of the bookshelves in my room: Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. The main character, a Turkish exiled poet named Ka, is listening to words spoken by the man engaged to the woman he loves.

I burst into tears and told her everything. She cried, too. 'Now that you've gone religious, are you going to wrap a scarf around my head?' I promised I would make no such demand. And as I was worried that she might think my change was due to economic reasons, I was quick to assure her that everything was going well at the store and that in spite of all the electricity outages the new Arçelik stoves were selling well--I said all this to calm her down.
I'm changing the rules on tagging other people. I never respond to that sort of prompt, so why include it? But feel free to leave your meme results or a link to your meme results in the comments.

5 comments:

  1. Seriously...the nearest book to me was Leaves of Grass by my man Walt Whitman, and five lines down on page 56 is....

    None obey'd the command to kneel,
    Some made a mad and helpless rush, some stood stark and straight,
    A few fell at once, shot in the temple or heart, the living and dead lay together....

    (The Alamo section of Song of Myself)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Closest book to me other than my dictionaries, is the one on top of the stacks of books by my bed: The essence of Yoga by Osho. Page 56, fifth sentence says such (if it can make any sense for you out of context):
    "And if a child misses the warmth of the mother, he can never be healthy; the body will always suffer."
    To put it back into context, this is part of the Osho's comments on Sutra 40, Sadhana Pada (Book 2 of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras). This original sutra translation says: "When purity is attained, there arises in the yogi a disgust for his own body and a disinclination to come in physical contact with others"

    ReplyDelete
  3. The closest book to me is Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

    When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We've been over all of this. I didn't bring myself to this. I was brought.

    I love to see what books other folks have nearby. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  4. The nearest book to me was "El juego del ángel" by Carlos Ruíz Zafón, and the five sentences on page 56 are:

    Sempere me guiñó el ojo y me dedicó aquella sonrisa misteriosa que parecía robada de un semanal del don Alejandro Dumas y que, decían, era marca de familia. Yo preferí no jugar con fuego. ¿Hablar de qué?

    The outcome is very funy.

    Mercedes

    ReplyDelete
  5. The Birth of Civilization in the Near East pg 56 starting on line 6, because line 5 is the last four words of a sentence:

    "The significance of the ziggurats is revealed by the names which many of them bear, names which identify them as mountains. That the god Enlil at Nippur, for example, was called "House of the Mountain, Mountain of the Storm, Bond between Heaven and Earth.

    ReplyDelete

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The NONEXISTENT Rockway Press Short Story Contest

Rockway Press never actually posted the winners of the 2007 contest. Their site has entirely disappeared, and they're on the Preditors and Editors list.