Closest book to hand..
Time for one of those infectious and virulent1 net memes! Found this one on Chris Samuel’s Blog.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the next three sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
- Tag five other people to do the same.
Here’s mine:
Five in the evening and she can barely keep her eyes open. Lifts her cup of black unsweetened coffee. Mouse-clicks.
That’s from Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I counted the partial sentence which carried over on to page 23 as the first sentence, but I agonised about it first. 
The laptop is on the loungeroom table at the moment, so I had a pretty wide selection to choose from - we’re not always very good at putting books away properly. Still, without getting out a tape measure I’m pretty sure that one was the most accessible of the closest books.
The other most likely candidate was How to Improve Your Chess, which I fetched out with the intention of studying, but haven’t got back to yet. I’ve been playing regularly on Gameknot.com, which I’m really impressed with as it has a great interface, and large community, and seems to be quite actively maintained. I’ll get around to buying a paid account one day.
[1] Is this redundant? I don’t think so, as it seems that “infectious” merely indicates potential while “virulent” implies a particularly high degree of infectiousness. Hmm, on second thoughts I guess that does make infectious redundant in this context. This reminds me of something I was wondering about yesteday, namely2:
[2] What is the etymology of “equivocal”? I was guessing something literally along the lines of “between voices” or “middle effort”. The dictionary included in Mac OSX (which is actually really nice, by the way) says:
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin aequivocus, from Latin aequus ‘equally’ + vocare ‘to call.’
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