Fun exercise? This is stolen from Mom's blog....

Grab the nearest book.
1. Open it to page 161.
2. Find the fifth full sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
4. Don't search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.


I just finished reading The Sudden Guest by Christopher La Farge. I picked it up from the marina trade-a-book rack. It appears to be an original issue book from 1946 and did not appear to have ever been read before. It's kindof like a Jane Austen novel. You get into the "prose" after a while and you start "thinking" in the stilted language.

So here is the text - I know you're going to think I made this up:

" Surely, even in those days of shortages of good and competent servants, even allowing for an abnormal devotion to the welfare of the baby Winlock (a devotion which had not been particularly mainfest), it was all out of proportion; and although it was possible to attribute much to the sinmple cause of shock and fatique, both of them natural and great in the circumstances, Mrs. Cleever's rapidity in recovery denied the simple explanation and complicated her curious testimony."

It really was a good book - although seeing this sentence out of context is quite funny!