I do not usually do memes, but as I was tagged by Imogen, and as this is a book meme…

1. Pick up the nearest book.
Here I encountered difficulties. I am sitting at my desk. Directly above the computer monitor there is a shelf. Not wanting to go in search of a measuring device, I closed my eyes, spun three turns on my chair and let my index finger decide for me - Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. This was one of those books I read way before anyone thought I should have done. I was maybe ten, eleven. I read a lot of Atwood; I went through an ‘Atwood phase’. Mami’s friends would look from me curled up with my head submerged between pages, to Mami and back again, disapprovingly. With Cat’s Eye, when I was nine, they shook their heads and said, if she was my daughter… Same with Alice Sebold’s Lucky. In my last year at primary school, my Year Six form teacher - tall, blonde, shattered my naive teachers-are-not-real-people illusion - confiscated a cold-blooded murder mystery from my locker, and read to me with loaded intonation the first page, in which the victim is found at the bottom of a cement mixer on a construction site.

2. Open to page 123.
Fifth page of chapter fifteen. I flicked through the pages before and after; none of it familiar other than the disjointed first person narrative, which could pretty much be half of anything by Atwood.

3. Find the fifth sentence.
If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.

4. Post the next three sentences.
But how did they evolve, where did the first one come from, they weren’t an invasion from another planet, they were terrestrial. How did we get bad. For us when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great evil, many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil.

She is writing about Americans. After having met some who killed a heron, or did something disgraceful with fish.

5. Tag five people.
I can’t walk past a person reading a book in a public place without a surreptitious glance at the cover. Some woman engrossed in a paperback as she floated awol into the centre of a cloud on a miserable day in the middle of last winter collided with a lampost. She looked up and apologised profusely before drifting on with a finger pressed into the spine. I did some remarkably speedy yet unobtrusive catching up. What is it, I asked over her shoulder, and please read me the fifth sentence on page one hundred and twenty three. She enveloped the mystery book in the folds of her roomy duffel jacket protectively and scurried away into the cloud, astutely avoiding further collisions.

Anyway, your go.
Useless Rants
No Plan B
Ziv Catbee
Jonathon Mercer
Jules (in any shape or blog form)