Page 123 (doing the meme thing)

Book the 1st:

He is a great waver of his arms over his head as he makes pronouncements like “There is nothing certain but taxes”—conspicuously excluding death.

–Joel Garreau, Radical Evolution

Google Blog Search tells me this has been going on for a while, but I just saw it for the first time at Peter Saint-Andre’s blog. Since it gave me an excuse to post, I’m playing the game:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal…along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Radical Evolution was the nearest book at hand on my desk. I had started reading it a while back but it hasn’t grabbed me and I’ve grounded out on page 36. Growing up, I always finished books that I started. I had more time and patience. Over the years I’ve started abandoning books, but I usually blame myself, taking it as a personal failure when it could actually be that the author has failed me and the book just isn’t worth the time when there are so many other better ones. Or it could just be a shortened attention span. This one looks interesting, but maybe I’ll turn to Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near instead.

Had I encountered the meme last night, another book would have been nearer:

Book the 2nd:

The landing was soft, on freshly plowed fields, in the memory of the men from Easy the softest they ever experienced.

–Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers

Except I cheated. That is the sixth sentence. The fifth is: “Easy came down exactly where it was supposed to be.” I thought the HBO Band of Brothers miniseries was super. The book is good also, and I’m making much better progress in it. The series must have followed the book pretty closely because a lot of it sounds familiar.