I’ve been having fun with a Facebook meme that appears to have been around for quite some time, considering I’m seeing blog posts discussing it from 2008.
The idea is to grab the closest book to you, turn to page 56, and use the 5th sentence as your Facebook status. You then post the rules as the first comment.
Here are the rules of this game: grab the nearest book to you (not some sought out thing) and open up page 56 …publish the 5th sentence as your status and publish the rules as a comment to it.
There doesn’t appear to be a real object of the game and no resolution except what you make of it.
I’ve enjoyed plugging the sentences into Google to see if I can guess what books were at arm’s length when my Facebook friends opted to join the literary exercise. Is that cheating?
Whatever. I’m impatient and Google is still my friend. Here are a few examples, not of what my friends and family are reading, but of the books closest to them:
“She believed the travel posters.” — From James W. Hall’s Body Language.
“‘Tal-ee-own-‘ cried twelve battalion commanders.” — From Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
“The name was my last name, too.” – From Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. [I just love that two of my loved ones had Vonnegut at their fingertips. There’s a great Vonnegut reading list over at makefive.]
“He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred.” – From George Eliot’s (aka Mary Anne Evans) Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. [Hmm. Definitely intrigued by this one.]
“Besides, I had partying to do.” — From Brian Welch’s Save Me from Myself: How I Found God, Quit Korn, Kicked Drugs, and Lived to Tell My Story
Not all books have been indexed by Google though. Google and I were stumped by the line my dad posted: “Surely never had the Corn Maidens been led by one so lovely.”
It’s from Dawn Boy of the Pueblos, by Lena Becker Scott and published by the John C. Winston Company (1935). [Wow. This sounds fascinating.]
Mine happened to be a book I’m reading:
“But I don’t have a choice.” — From the first book by Becky Gillespie and Hollee Temple Schwartz, Good Enough is the New Perfect.
What’s great about this meme, now that I’ve taken time to track down a few references, is that I now have a couple more books, ones I’d never have found on my own, on my must-check-this-out list.
Virtual Farmgirl 