The latest fad sweeping the blogosphere is to write a seemingly strange sentence then to reveal the process that generated it. That process is to find the very nearest book, flip to page i, and copy sentence j. When I played the game, the nearest book was the Bible, but page 53 landed me in an Old Testament story not told to children.
The whole exercise reminded me of a similar fad in my high school English department. Teachers would write exams that consisted of several block quotations from an assigned novel. The quotations were placed without context, and the objective of the test was to identify the character speaking and the situation. These tests were popular with teachers in the brief interval after they realized that lengthy essays are poor indicators of whether students read the book and before they realized that quote tests are poor indicators of whether students read the book.
Anyway, I shall combine the two phenomena (using i=75, j=3) and draw sentences from famed books. Bonus points will be awarded for identifying the source without using Google Books; do not worry, it is a matching quiz.
1. “They worked prospects at Lewisville, Otter Creek, ‘the north fork of the middle of the American River,’ and elsewhere.”
2. “How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.”
3. “Who wants to hear a story that’s nothing but misfortune?”
4. “General James Oglethorpe was in many ways an appealing figure, and enthusiasts were ready to invest him with the heroic qualities for which the age was starved.”
5. “Do you mind me asking what was your native land?”
A. Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom. Urbana: Unv. of Illinois Press, 2005.
B. Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Colonial Experience. New York: Vintage, 1958.
C. Enger Lief. Peace Like A River. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
D. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Boston: C.H. Simons, 1926.
E. Wibberley, Leonard. The Mouse that Roared. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
(As proof of the classic status of these books, most of the editions I cite are not the first.)
Saturday, December 6, 2008
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