Turn to page 142 and...

[Fyrnae]

Often when I've been out book shopping, I've bought my book only to get it home and find it wasn't all that.

Prevent disappointment by using this simple book test!

Turn to page 142. Go to the second paragraph. Read it.

If that's interesting, or whatnot, the rest of the book often follows.

For the purposes of this thread, grab a book off the shelf and apply the Book Test.

Write your findings here. Include title and author. If there are no words, describe what is on page 142.

I'll start:

'Culture and corruption,' echoed Dorian. 'I have known something of both. It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together. For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I think I have altered.'

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde

[Latro]

I wish I had done this when I was assigned Jane Eyre. The first 20% or so of that book is so much worse than the rest of it, and so I put it off for far too long. I've never actually finished.

Sorry I don't have a copy of it around to actually do the exercise.

[Fyrnae]

Grab any book around you then, or a favourite book. Sometimes the findings are surprising, or almost like bibliomancy.

[Cooper]

Checkers cried in the little Catholic Chruch in Wellpinit. Father Arnold put his arms around her, and she cried into his shoulder, the soft fabric of his cassock. She put her arms around his waist, wanted to look into his eyes, but kept her face hidden.

'Reservation Blues' by Sherman Alexie

[SShack]

"He'd made the front page. He usually did. It was his athletic mouth. It ran away with him whenever he saw a notebook."

"Making Money," by Terry Pratchett. Happened to be sitting next to the desk. That is such a description of an ENTP, too.

[Latro]

The book I'm currently reading is The Complete Amber Chronicles, which is actually 10 short (~130 page each) books; I just finished the third one today. 142 is near the beginning of the second one. This is actually mid-dialogue, so "paragraph" is somewhat ill-defined, but:
"Eric of Amber, possibly."
"Who is he?
"A supernatural creature."
"He's the best?"
"No."
"Who is?"
"Benedict of Amber."
"Is he one, too?"
"If he is still alive, he is."
"Strange, that's what you are," she said. "And why? Tell me. Are you a supernatural creature?"
"Let's have another glass of wine."

The dialogue keeps going. Of pages you could've chosen, 142 doesn't work all that well for this particular book...

[vampyroteuthis]

"I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode! My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night. . . . What was I saying? Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a mountain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect."

Lawrence Durrell, Clea, 1961.

[Fyrnae]

Yes, lines of dialogue -- I knew I should have been more specific! I leave it up to the poster whether they only post the single line or include several.

The only books I have around with less than 142 pages are some older paperbacks and books from my childhood of which I'm particularly fond. In these instances, pick page 42.

Latro's solution was a good one also, if awkward and fiddly for him. My apologies. Marks for ingenuity, Latro.

[HackerX]

"The other villagers who had been captured had fared no better. The tatmadaw had tortured one old man shockingly. His liips, nose, eyelids and ears had all been hacked off. His eyeballs gouged out and squashed. They had pulped his testicles and roasted his feet over a fire. He must have died of shock when they were burning his feet as they'd left him there with his legs and what remained of his charred feet smouldering in the fire. They had nailed a young teenage boy to a tree by his ankles and flayed the flesh from his body with bamboo canes".

Shadow Warrior - David Everett/Kingsley Flett. It's an (auto) biography about an ex Australian SAS soldier turned mercenary & criminal.

Lucky you asked for the second paragraphy, the first is worse.

[refuse]

Fourth, metaphors can thus be appropriate because they sanction actions, justify inferences, and help us set goals. For example, certain actions, inferences, and goals are dictated by the LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART metaphor but not by the LOVE IS MADNESS metaphor. If love is madness, I do not concentrate on what I have to do to maintain it. But if it is work, then it requires activity, and if it is a work of art, it requires a very special kind of activity, and if it is collaborative, then it is even further restricted and specified.

Metaphors We Live By
-Lakoff and Johnson

sounds like drivel, but the book is actually quite enjoyable

[Merle]

Mallory made no reply, gazing down at Halliday with his dark sealed eyes. With a laugh, dispelling the slight tension between the two men, Leonora sat down on the chair beside Halliday.
'Richard won't tell us that, Mr Halliday. When we find his dreams we'll no longer need our own.'


"The Day of Forever" in J.G. Ballard: The Complete Short Stories, Vol. 2.

It's an excellent story - and kind of central to the work I'm doing right now - so it's funny that it happened to be on pg 142.

[Firebrand9]

"She searched through a litter of papers on a desk, found some typewritten sheets
and handed them to him. "Here’s the speech I made tonight," she said."

- Ayn Rand - "The Fountainhead".

I don't think this is a very good test. Page 142 on any given book has equal chance of being a dead part or an exciting part. I'd rather go to Amazon.com and read 3 1-star and 3 5-star reviews to get a broad overview of it.

[Edd Nigma]

What is the reasoning behind this?

A lot depends on how big the book is. Pg 142 can be the beginning, middle, or end. The closer it falls to the middle, the more likely it is to be interesting. So the only real assumption we can make based on this is that 200-350 page books are more likely to "pass the test" than others.

[sage33]

"Sure, faith is a jolt. And nonloners respond to jolts with a yearning for validation... by sharing, by comparing notes, nonloners decide what is true."

"Loners react differently to jolts. Since loners are often alone, jolts tend to strike when loners are alone...We keep things to ourselves...Faith is a private matter."

Anneli Rufus- "Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto"

That's an excellent idea. I will most likely start using that method more often.

Granted I have already read this book (which is one of my favorites). I have tried this method with another book that I haven't read and it does give you an idea of what the book is about without having read the summary.

[idem]

Here's a few lines of dialogue from the 142nd page of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams):

"According to the legends," he said, "the Magratheans lived most of their lives underground."

"Why's that?" said Arthur. "Did the surface become too polluted or overpopulated?"

"No, I don't think so," said Zaphod. "I think they just didn't like it very much."

[Latro]

Yes, lines of dialogue -- I knew I should have been more specific! I leave it up to the poster whether they only post the single line or include several.

The only books I have around with less than 142 pages are some older paperbacks and books from my childhood of which I'm particularly fond. In these instances, pick page 42.

Latro's solution was a good one also, if awkward and fiddly for him. My apologies. Marks for ingenuity, Latro.
It's actually not really innovative in this case, because I have them in one huge volume, so it's page 142 of the whole volume, which just happens to be in the second book.

[Fyrnae]

^ Marks for honesty

Long ago, when snared like thee
By the Sidhe, my harp and I
O'er them wove the slumber spell,
Warbling well its lullaby.

The Irish Fairy Book
Alfred Perceval Graves

[rara avis]

"This was about six months after I got divorced, so that makes maybe a year and a half ago," he said. "We had this threesome five or six times. I never slept with Kiki alone. I wonder why. I really should have."

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami

It does sound moderately more interesting that the first few pages I read before forgetting I was reading it.

[tcp]

What is the reasoning behind this?

A lot depends on how big the book is. Pg 142 can be the beginning, middle, or end. The closer it falls to the middle, the more likely it is to be interesting. So the only real assumption we can make based on this is that 200-350 page books are more likely to "pass the test" than others.

Maybe we can incorporate some kind of formula which will tell us what fraction of the book we should pick a page in ...
Or we can compare a page from the first third, second third, and last third of the book. That would be more telling?

I wanna play!

Hmm there is no dialogue on page 142 of this book. (Ian McEwan, the child in time)

Those who find it naturally hard to wield authority over their children should seriously consider the systematic use of treats and rewards. The promise of chocolate in return for, say, good bedtime behavior is, on balance, worth the minor damage to teeth which will in any case soon replace themselves. In the past, too much has been demanded of parents, who have been exhorted to inculcate altruism in their children at all costs. Incentives, after all, form the basis of our economic structure and necessarily shape our morality; there is no reason on earth why a well-behaved child should not have an ulterior motive.

[Armonia]

"As I was exiting off the freeway, the aggressive driver came up ehind me and raced on by."

Don't sweat the small stuff - Richard Carlson

[Serendip]

Fat Charlie had planned to have an argument with Spider as soon as Spider came home. He had rehearsed the argument in his head, over and over, and had won it, both fairly and decisively, every time.

2nd para, pg 142: Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman

[Antares]

If Mr. Fish had been in his hammock, and if he had woken up, he would have seen something unforgettable passing under the Front Street lamplights. The dark and massive truck, lumbering into the night, and the woman in the red dress- a headless woman with a stunning figure, but with no arms- held around her hips by a child attached to a chain, or a dwarf.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

It's moderately queer, I suppose, to grab my interest for a while. And that's exactly what the book did.

What is the reasoning behind this?

A lot depends on how big the book is. Pg 142 can be the beginning, middle, or end. The closer it falls to the middle, the more likely it is to be interesting. So the only real assumption we can make based on this is that 200-350 page books are more likely to "pass the test" than others.

Well, it also depends on the reader. I'm not that patient with long, drawn out expositions that lasts for as long as page -cough- 142. If it doesn't start to interest me by then, it never will.

Test Subject 2: The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins

I've had the book for a while now, but have never really read it. Page 142 is between the chapters, so it's blank :o so I turned to the next page with text. Here goes.

Let's again make use of our analogy of the detective coming to the scene of a crime to which there were no eye witnesses. The baronet has been shot. Fingerprints, footprints, DNA fro ma sweat stain on the pistol, and a strong motive all point towards the butler. It's pretty much an open and shut case, and the jury and everybody in the court is convinced that the butler did it. But a last-minute piece of evidence is discovered, in the nick of time before the jury retires to consider what had seemed to be their inevitable verdict of guilty: somebody remembers that the baronet had installed spy cameras against burglars. With bated breath, the court watches the films. One of the shows the butler in the act of opening hte drawer in his pantry, taking out a pistol, loading it, and creeping stealthily out of the room with a malevolent gleam in his eye. You might think this solidifies the case against hte butler even further. Mark the sequel, however. The butler's defence lawyer astutely points out that there was no spy camera in the library where the murder took place, and no spy camera in the corridor leading from the butler's pantry. He wags his finger, in that compelling way that lawyers have make their own. 'There's a gap in the video record! We don't know what happened after the butler left the pantry. There is clearly insufficient evidence to convict my client.'

Wow. Maybe I should read it.

[Fyrnae]

'And you do, do you?' Hans said. 'You know how things operate.'
'I'm getting an inkling.'
'Perhaps we should discuss this sometime.'
'I don't think so,' Cathy said.
Hans frowned.
'I don't think words can really pin it down,' she said. 'Or that we should try to.'

The Man in the Moss
Phil Rickman

[idem]

"Sir! I respectfully--"
"Permission to speak denied," the major says. "I won't even get into your obsession with General MacArthur."
"Sir! That general is a murdering--"
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

[Serendip]

"Sir! I respectfully--"
"Permission to speak denied," the major says. "I won't even get into your obsession with General MacArthur."
"Sir! That general is a murdering--"
"Shut up!"
"Sir! Yes, sir!"

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Ahh, Cryptonomicon ... should be called Cryptomarathon!

[SimplyOtter]

K, here I go:

Dear Annie,
"What do you do if you think you've wasted fifteen years of your life?" Are you kidding me? I don't know if anyone ever told you, but Im pretty much the world expert on this particular subject"

Juliet, Nacked - by Nick Hornby, pag 142

hey the experiment works!! I would definitely buy the book again, should I have read this bit before... :)

[Kisai]

Kelsier nodded. "If one of our people is noticed by a Seeker, they can run back to the lair and disappear. They can also practice their abilities without fear of being discovered. Allomantic pulses coming from a shop in a skaa sector of town would be a quick giveaway to a passing Inquisitor".

Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson, Tor Fantasy paperback, 2nd ed.

[Fyrnae]

In the presence of this strange woman from the western islands, the chief felt his spirits slowly returning. The pallor left his face; his eyes grew clearer, but above all, a small hope, like an inner warmth, deep within his body, began to grow again.Sarum by Edward Rutherfurd

[idem]

"Naturally, I was in no position to gather such information, since I am a newcomer here myself," said Peter Petrovich. "Nevertheless, they are two very, very clean little rooms, and since it's to be for such a short time ... And I've already found our regular, that is, our future apartment." He addressed Raskolnikov. "It is being done over now. Meanwhile, I myself am living in crowded furnished rooms, a few steps from here, at Mrs. Lippewechsel's, in the apartment of a certain young friend of mine, Andrey Semionych Lebeziatnikov. He was the one who told me about Bakaleev's house."

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Fyrnae]

And Billy and the Maori and others helping them with their particular hole came at last to a membrane of timbers laced over ricks which had wedged together to form an accidental dome. They made a hole in the membrane. There was darkness and space under there.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5

[Trevor Black]

I did it with my favourite book, Do androids dream of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick, and I was pleasantly surprised:

Roy Baty said, "I vote we kill Mr. Isidore and hide somewhere else." He and his wife -and John Isidore- now turned tautly toward Pris.

[Barry Allen]

Art as Experience by John Dewey

"Now there is nothing different in principle here from what is done in the furnishing of a room, when the householder sees to it that tables, chairs, rugs, lamps, color of the walls, and spacing of the pictures on them are so selected and arranged that they do not clash but form an ensemble. Otherwise there is confusion - confusion, that is, in perception. Vision cannot then complete itself. It is broken up into a succession of disconnected acts, now seeing this, now that, and no mere succession is a series. When masses are balanced, colors harmonized, and lines and planes meet and intersect fittingly, perception will be serial in order to grasp the whole and each sequential act builds up and reinforces what went before. Even at first glance there is the sense of qualitative unity. There is form.

awesome

[Sakari]

Twelve weekends later was the first performance of Hamlet, although it was actually an abbreviated modern version, because the real Hamlet is too long and confusing, and most of the kids in my class have ADD. For example, the famous "To be or not to be" speech, which I know about from the Collected Shakespeare set Grandma bought me, was cut down so that it was just, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

[idem]

"You are right, Mr. Ai, you are right!" Slose said violently. "Within a month you will send for that ship, and it will be made welcome in Orgoreyn as the visible sign and seal of the new epoch. Their eyes will be opened who will not see now!"
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

[BlackMita]

"I made a mistake, Kemp, a huge mistake, in carrying this thing through alone. I have wasted strength, time, opportunities. Alone--it is wonderful how little a man can do alone! To rob a little, to hurt a little, and there is no end.

H.G Wells, The Invisible Man

[Distance]

But this interest that indirectly attaches to the Beautiful through our inclination to society, and consequently is empirical, is of no importance to us here; because we have only to look to what may have a reference, although only indirectly, to the judgement of taste a priori.

The Critique of Judgement
Author: Immanuel Kant
Translator: J.H. Bernard

[temi]

Omigod, page 142 doesn't have a second paragraph! It's all one continuation of the same paragraph from the previous page flowing onto the next.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[Distance]

Mine didn't have a second paragraph either so I quoted from the one and only paragraph on that page.

[temi]

I'll do the second sentence:

He kept on examining her, discovering the miracle of her intimacy inch by inch, and he felt his skin tingle as he contemplated the way her skin tingled when it touched the water.

[Akzis]

Dante's Divine Comedy:

And one of which, not many years ago,
I broke for someone, who was drowning in it;
Be this a seal all men to undeceive.

Strangely relevant.

[lurk]

A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

One of the people working with Rutherford was a mild and affable young Dane named Niels Bohr. In 1913, while puzzling of the structure of the atom, Bohr had an idea so exciting that he postponed his honeymoon to write what became a landmark paper. ... Called "On the Constitutions of Atoms and Molecules" the paper explained how electrons could keep from falling into the nucleus by suggesting that they could occupy only certain well-defined orbits.

[Soobpar]

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Same book I was looking at. Damn INTJ's...

[OwenF]

It was a starry cally sort of a mesto that I could not remember going into since I was a very very malenky malchick, no more than about six years old, and there were two parts of it--one part to borrow books and one part to read in, full of gazettas and mags and like the von of very starry old men with their plotts stinking of like old age and poverty. These were standing at the gazetta stands all round the room, sniffling and belching and govoreeting to themselves and turning over the pages to read the news very sadly, or else they were sitting at the tables looking at the mags or pretending to, some of them asleep and one or two of them snoring real gromky. I couldn't remember what it was I wanted at first, then I remembered with a bit of a shock that I had ittied here to find out how to snuff it without pain, so I goolied over to the shelf full of reference veshches. There were a lot of books, but there was none with a title, brothers, that would really do. There was a medical book that I took down, but when I opened it it was full of drawings and photographs of horrible wounds and diseases, and that made me want to sick just a bit. So I put that back and took down the big book or Bible, as it was called, thinking that might give me like comfort as it had done in the old Staja days (not so old really, but it seemed a very very long time ago), and I staggered over to a chair to read in it. But all I found was about smiting seventy times seven and a lot of Jews cursing and tolchocking each other, and that made me want to sick, too. So then I near cried, so that a very starry ragged moodge opposite me said:

"What is it, son? What's the trouble?"

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange


The page-142 test might be slightly misleading with this novel because Burgess does a nice job of introducing his nadsat words early on, making for easier reading than this sample might suggest. I see that there are several nadsat glossaries online now. Here's one (To view links or images in this forum your post count must be 2 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.) for your enjoyment, oh my brothers.

[OwenF]

Sometimes, when I was sick, but also when I was perfectly healthy, I would have strange sensations called, as I learned thirty years later, disturbances of the body-image. I lay in bed with my hands on my chest, and suddenly they would start growing, while under their incredible mass I became smaller and smaller. This happened several times, and definitely when I was awake. My hands grew to mountainous size, the fingers turning into enormous closed arches in their monstrous elephantiasis. I was frightened, but only a little, it was so strange—and told no one.

Taken from Stanislaw Lem’s Highcastle.

The quotation is from page 42. Page 142 is blank.

[Autodidact]

As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means. In particular, I think of the mass of people who are today unemployed. Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called "unemployment neurosis." And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like—in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity—their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

"Man's Search for Meaning", Viktor Frankl. A surprisingly interesting paragraph.

[idem]

But the hunchback was the leader. There was never doubt. Without him, Inigo knew where he would be: on his back begging wine in some alley entrance. The Sicilian's Word was not just law, it was gospel.

So when he said, "Kill the man in black," all other possibilities ceased to exist. The man in black had to die...

The Princess Bride, William Goldman

[OwenF]

What now? One gives the mole wings and proud conceits—before it is time to go to sleep, before he crawls back into his hole? One sends him off into the theater and places large glasses before his blind and tired eyes? Men whose lives are not an "action" but a business, sit before the stage and observe strange creatures for whom life is no mere business? "That is decent," you say; "that is entertaining; that is culture."

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science

[eam]

It is precisely the combination of these five interconnected characteristics of malignant cells that creates the regressive process we have come to call cancer. And it is these same five factors among human organisms in any family or institution that create the emotional processes that are also malignant. Furthermore, in neither case can health be restored by a quick fix or through understanding. The understanding that is needed is how to prevent the progression of their invasivness. For malignant processes at any level of life's organization are not simply the presence of a noxious force;they are rather an essential life process that has been perverted. The ultimate similarity between organisms and organizations (between bodies and bodies politic) is that, unlike diseases "caused" by the continued presence of some chronically troublemaking noxious agent, as in the case of a virus or bacterium, malignant processes continue to subvert even though the toxic agent that initiated the original misdirection is no longer around to continue energizing the pathology.

"A Failure of Nerve"
By Edwin Friedman

[Wryter]

"You appeared for the first time to the Reader in a bookshop; you took shape, detaching yourself from a wall of shelves, as if the quantity of books made the presence of a young lady Reader necessary. Your house, being the one place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast to the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. To understand this, our Reader knows that the first step is to visit the kitchen."

Italo Calvino, "If on a winter's night a traveler"

[Ilara]

Works like the looking-glass in the fairy tale, he says; you look into it and you see not yourself but, for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man can fly. Ah, yes, but to have glimpsed the Inaccessible is, however imperfectly, to have gained access to it. Once we have found the mirror, we can return to it again and again.

One Half of Robertson Davies: Provocative Pronouncements on a Wide Range of Topics, "What May Canada Expect From Her Writers?"; Robertson Davies

Nice paragraph. ^>^

[Night Runner]

For Nanavira, that "came as a bit of a shock (though also as a bit of relief)." In the end, he came to view only two of the three "baskets" (Pitaka) of the Pali Canon as authentic: those containing the Buddha's discourses (Sutta) and the monastic training (Vinaya). "No other Pali books whatsoever," he insisted, "should be taken as authoritative; and ignorance of them (and particularly of the traditional Commentaries) may be counted a positive advantage, as leaving less to be unlearned." Nanamoli, by contrast, embarked on the translation of the greatest commentary of them all: Buddhaghosa's "The Path of Purity" (Visuddhimagga).

Stephen Batchelor, Confession of a Buddhist Atheist

[idem]

All the railway lines north of the Thames and the Southeastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were now being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing room in the carriages even at two o'clock. By three, people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect.

War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

[SelfMadeBum]

"No news, Daddy," she would say, closing the door of the private room, drawing up a chair and offering the latest scrap of news. Calling him "Daddy" gave her a secret and almost erotic thrill. "Someone was seen in Scarborough, but it was another false alarm."

The Stars Tennis Balls, Stephen Fry

[Jarem Asyder]

The purpose of publicity is to make the spectator marginally dissatisfied with his present way of life. Not with the way of life of society, but with his own within it. It suggests that if he buys what it is offering, his life will become better. It offers him an improved alternative to what he is.

John Berger. "Ways of Seeing."

[Synchronicity]

"It is no good," said Syme. "He will never get anything out of that old heathen. I vote we drive bang through the thick of them, bang as the bullets went through Bull's hat. We may all be killed, but we must kill a tidy number of them."

The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton

[seeyouatx]

››Es machte ›Plopp‹ und ein kleiner Mann mit bösen dunklen Augen und weit geöffnetem Mund erschien. Die Beine über Kreuz, schwebte er vor ihnen in der Luft und packte die Spazierstöcke.‹‹

Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen, by J.K. Rowling, translated by Klaus Fritz.

[AcuMan]

When I read the thread title I was expecting it to be about Choose Your Own Adventure books. :(

[Turn to page 62, if you are disappointed]

[Fyrnae]

Sorry to disappoint, Acuman -- I remember many fine evenings when I was young spent enjoying those books. Perhaps you could devise a thread based around this? It could end up as a Game Thread. The only reason this thread isn't there is because I didn't think it had enough game-like qualities to it. For now, just grab your favourite one & post here from page 42.

From page 142:

Haruko tried to feel relieved, but he had been badly shaken by the sight of that - that nothing sretching across the galactic horizon like a giant maw, and Melangell gave him a sympatheic smile.

'The first time I saw the Morimaruse,' she offered, 'I was physically ill. It's not meant for folk to see such things, perhaps; our minds cannot absorb the idea of it.'

The Copper Crown, Patricia Kennealy

[Jarem Asyder]

can I do another one? I have like 30 thesis research books sitting next to my desk. c:

George Ikishawa used to say the the bourgeois theater is the finished theater. The bourgeoisie already knows what the world is like, thier world, and is able to present images of this complete, finished world. The bourgeoisie presents the spectacle. On the other hand, the proletariat and the oppressed classes do not know yet what their world will be like; consequently their theater will be the rehearsal, not the finished spectacle. This is quite true, though it is equally true that the theater can present images of transition.

Augusto Boal, "Theatre of the Oppressed"

[AtheneNoctua]

'From his garden, Mr. Collins would have led them round his two meadows, but the ladies, not having shoes to encounter the remains of a white frost, turned back; and while Sir William accompanied him, Charlotte took her sister and friend over the house, extremely well pleased, probably, to have the opportunity of shewing it without her husband's help. It was rather small, but well built and convenient; and everything was fitted up and arranged with a neatness and consistency of which Elizabeth gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be forgotten, there was really a great air of comfort throughout, and by Charlotte's evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed he must be often forgotten'

Pride and Prejudice... not entirely sure whether this works or not

[OwenF]

The mask floated on the wind. "We leave you. Prepare. The land is yours."

In the blowing moonlight, like metal petals of some ancient flower, like blue plumes, like cobalt butterflies immense and quiet, the old ships turned and moved over the shifting sands, the masks beaming and glittering, until the last shine, the last blue color, was lost among the hills.

"Elma, why did they do it? Why didn't they kill me? Don't they know anything? What's wrong with them? Elma, do you understand?" He shook her shoulder. "I own half of Mars!"

She watched the night sky, waiting.

—Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

[ReasoningMind]

Reluctantly she left the carriage. The suddenness of the move was in itself enough to have upset her, but she was also worrying about what Prince Hyobukyo would think when he found that his child had vanished. And indeed what was going to become of her? One way or another all her mistresses seemed to be taken from her and it was only when she became frightened of having wept for so long on end that she at last dried her eyes and began to pray.

The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

Mmm I'm curious.

[KHBaker]

Excessive Lubricant - Have you removed all traces of sizing lubricant from the cases? If not, they will be inconsistent in the way they grip the chamber at peak pressure. Speer Reloading Manual #14, highly recommended!

[OwenF]

Particularly awkward is one but closely followed by another, thus making a contrast to a contrast, or a reservation to a reservation. This is easily corrected by rearrangement.

—The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E. B. White (page 42)

[Khi Rho]

"Murdoch was a Californian boy, the kind of adolescent drifter that state had so often produced, until he drifted into the Corps and discovered a purpose in life. The purpose was the maintenance of portable weaponry and the instruction of recruits in the use of same, and it was the only thing Mudoch seemed to care about. When Contact emptied Quantico, Murdoch was devastated. He kept driving back to the base, he said, every few days, like an ant to an empty nest"

The Harvest, Robert Charles Wilson

[coffeeforme]

"The government suggested that the greater risk was the silent, far-too-pervasive leaking of illuminating gas into people's homes. In New York alone deaths from illuminating gas continued to rise: 519 accidental asphyxiations reported in 1927 and 607 in the following year."

The Poisoner's Handbook, Deborah Blum

[LifeWellWasted]

"By contrast, it is the sovereign force of resolution, supported by progressive constitution of the apparatus of will that dominated the classical age, that seems to me to have blocked the way to a concept of anti-stress in the West. This leads Westerners today to use frivolous and quirky terms such as "cool," "zen," and the like, in order top make way for the relaxation whose salutary effects invariably elicit comment."

Vital Nourishment-Departing from Happiness, Francois Jullien

[Supaslim]

I ate breakfast cheerily, watching the dust motes stirring in the sunlight that streamed through the back window. Charlie called out a goodbye, and I heard the cruise pull away from the house. I hesitated on my way out the door, hand on my rain jacket.

Nope, Twilight is still a shitty read.

Shall we try something else?

I had thought, after seeing that net of souls, that nothing could frighten me anymore, but I was wrong. Kankredin was not Tanamil. He was not young. He was old- old in the way a stone is old, hard and lasting and as if he had never been otherwise. And like a stone when you turn it over in the earth, a coldness breathed off him. He froze my skin and lifted the hairs on my arms even before I looked at him properly.

Much better.

[Distance]

"I'm Miranda," answered the woman. "Come along. You wouldn't be here if the situation didn't warrant it. I've heard of you, Jim Dasher, and what I've heard is good: we need sneaky bastards on our side at a time like this."

Guess. ;)

[OwenF]

Master William Twyti turned out in daylight to be a shriveled, harassed-looking man, with an expression of melancholy on his face. All his life he had been forced to pursue various animals for the royal table, and, when he had caught them, to cut them up into their proper joints. He was more than half a butcher. He had to know what parts the hounds should eat, and what parts should be given to the assistants. He had to cut everything up handsomely, leaving two vertebrae on the tail to make the chine look attractive, and almost ever since he could remember he had been either pursuing a hart or cutting it up into helpings.

—T. H. White, The Once and Future King

[plotthickens]

The Duck waved his hand, to show he took no offense. "Short as a fireplug, hairy as a..." He hesitated. "She taught me how to shave, okay?"

The Callahan Touch, by Spider Robinson

[littledarkmoon]

"Even if things only take such a good turn in one of a thousand cases," my explanation continues, "who can guarantee that in your case it will not happen one day, sooner or later? But in the first place, you have to live to see the day on which it may happen, so you have to survive in order to see that day dawn, and from now on the responsibility for survival does not leave you."

Man's Search For Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl

[Fyrnae]

To hoots from the distant Dubornos, he swapped places with her, taking over the bowl and grinding stick while Airmid lifted their carrying sack and tipped the contents onto the grass between them. A scatter of different plants fell out, half of them tall with wide oval leaves and prickled stems and bell-shaped flowers the colour of mare's milk that hung in clusters from the stems. The rest had smaller, greener leaves that shone like a wet river pebble and neat red flowers that flecked the stem like drops of blood. As he watched, she sorted them swiftly into bunches of each kind and began tearing them up to drop in the water. When both buntches had gone, she started stirring. 'You can come and look,' she said. 'Just don't stop grinding the paste or it will stiffen.'

from Boudica by Manda Scott

[OwenF]

Nobody saw my expression because my back was towards them. Staley looked very surprised, but both of us caught on very quickly as to what happened, so I pulled the top drawer out with a flourish and said, “And there you are!”

Staley said, “I see what you mean; it’s a very good scheme”—and we walked out. Everybody was amazed. It was complete luck. Now I really had a reputation for opening safes.

—Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

[Smokescreen]

Bones cracked under the jarring impact as the juggernaut's thick metal skull rammed into the Skulltaker's steed, hurtling it a hundred yards through the air. The steed landed in a broken pile, snarling and snapping as it tried to force its broken body to rise.

- Blood for the Blood God by C.L. Werner

[MortalWombat]

A starry reading veck next to me said: 'Shhhh' again, looking up this time, and something clicked for both of us. I viddied who it was. He said, real gromky:

Pretty much sums up what the book has been, so far. The language takes some getting used to.

[zimtgeschmack]

'He headed south. Approximately south-for he did not steer by magnetic compass, but only by the compass of his nose, which sent him skirting every city, every village, every settlement. For weeks he met not a single person. And he might have been able to cradle himself in the soothing belief that he was alone in a world bathed in darkness or the cold light of the moon, had his delicate compass not taught him better.'

-Perfume by Süskind

Interesting exercise though.

[OwenF]

There are many points to be noted here. We meet energeia used in the sense of force producing work. The various energeia no doubt refer to the interaction of different parts of a single machine, not to multi-purpose machines; but the use of the term is none the less interesting. Operator, mechanopoios, is a term most often used for military engineers—recall Savoy and Carnot; schasteria is used for the release-mechanisms of catapults and ballistae, but also for the use of automatic machines such as Heron’s device for producing holy water. The term for machine here is organon, and this, taken with mechanopoios, suggests a reference to something like a catapult, a war-mechanism. The author goes on, however, to speak of puppets. “In the same way the men who work puppet-shows, by pulling a single string, make the creature’s neck move, and his hand and shoulder and eye, and sometimes every part of the body, according to a rhythmical pattern. So also the divine nature, within a single movement of the nearest element, distributes its dynamis to the next part and then to the more remote parts until it permeates the whole. One thing is moved by another, and then itself moves another in regular order, all things acting in the manner appropriate to their own constitution; for the way is not the same for all things, but different and various, in some cases quite opposite, though the key of the whole movement, as it were, is set by a single note.”

—from page 42 of Jack Lindsay's Blast Power and Ballistics: Concepts of Force & Energy in the Ancient World (as page 142 is an image of Prometheus and Athena creating man)

[Danisty]

I pushed the entrance door open and slipped out onto the icy sidewalk. The white owl circled above my head like a bundle of fluff.
Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko

"You sent for me," Hekatah said impatiently, then dropped her voice back into the soothing croon. "How can I help you, Sister?"
The Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop


Both of these turned out to probably be the most boring paragraph on the page.

[Blondie]

Page 142 of The Trial by Franz Kafka is a wall of text, so...

"He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell for ever."

- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

[Fyrnae]

In all her forty-six years, only one man had ever touch Gifford like that, or like this -- only one man had ever torn off her clothing, in jest or clumsiness, ever forced his organ inside her, and kissed her throat. And this was flesh, no ghost, flesh. Came through. I can't. God help me.

Lasher by Anne Rice

[Desmond Linus]

"'You want me to be honest, don't you?'
'No.'
'You don't?'
'Of course not. Why should I?'

An unexpected answer like that always outfoxes her, strikes her speechless for a few moments, makes her stammer and regret even further that she came barging into my study so rashly in the first place to start up with me. If she tries to continue the contest, her voice will drop to a diffident murmur that is almost to faint to be heard (I will pretend not to hear any of it and make her repeat each remark); or she will explode suddenly in a snarling, unintelligible, dramatic outburst and storm away in total defeat, banging some furniture or slamming a door. (I can outfox her easily every time.) But she never seems to learn (or she [I]has[I] learned and is drawn self-destructively to repeat these same cheerless defeats), so we go through innumerable repetitions of these same annoying, time-wasting, belittling (she makes fun of me because I'm getting fat. And getting bald. And I strike back by being faster, keener, and better informed in my repartee) "frank" and "honest" disputes with each other (I manage to win them all, although I sometimes feel wounded afterward) over money, smoking, sex, marijuana, late hours, dirty words, schoolwork, drugs, Blacks, freedom (hers), yelling, bullying, and insults to my wife."- Page 142 of Something Happened by Joseph Heller.

[katrin]

"Blessed be!"
"Yay. There is no other reason to be given as why you have not gone to Hell when you sat yoursen down here, provoking His pure een by your wicked manner of attending His solemn worship. Ay, there's nowt else as can be given as the reason for why you do not at this very moment drop down into Hell."

Thursbitch by Alan Garner. The book only has 158 pages. This passage doesn't really give much clue as to what the book's about...

[Fyrnae]

He put a hand on it to steady it and I watched it slow and stop. 'My friend, Gerard Mercator, made this for me when we were both students together. He will be a great map-maker one day, I know it. And I --' He broke off. 'I shall follow my path,' he said. 'Wherever it leads me. I have to be clear in my head and free from ambition and live in a country which is clear and free. I have to walk a clear path.'
The Queen's Fool by Philippa Gregory