Fancy book learnin'

"Lookie here, he be gone done tryin' to read!"

There's a doins a transpirin' in the world o' meme-ery, but thankfully, this one involves one of my favorite things, books. En plus, I was tagged by my favorite nun, so it makes it extra special or religious or something like that.

Here are the rules, suckers:

1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more.

2. Find page 123.

3. Find the first 5 sentences and read them.

4. Post the next 3 sentences.

Easy as freshly-baked pie cooling on the windowsill, no? Not exactly. Given where I sit at home while typing up some of the ridiculous posts of this crappy blog, the final book on not one, but two separate and distinct shelves rests equidistant from yours truly. It would seem that I was presented by the Fates with a dilemma, but rest easy, for it was a problem that offered its own solution.

I had the choice of excerpts from the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, or from the book pictured below. See, told you it was a piece of cake pie.


















Given Proust's proclivity towards enormous sentences, the five that I was required to read took up nearly all of page 123. Therefore, the bulk of these three sentences appears on the following page, where the narrator has just left a swanky soirée at the Guermantes' place and is traveling in their coupé.

I was to tire myself out seeking vainly to imagine, during the months when my desire turned rather to young girls, what the one whom Saint-Loup had talked to me about was like in her person, or who she was, and during the months when I would have preferred a lady's maid, that of Mme Putbus. But how restful, after being perpetually troubled by my anxious longings for so many fugitive creatures whose names even I often did not know, who were in any case so hard to find, even more so to get to know, and impossible perhaps to conquer, to have selected, from out of all this scattered, fugitive, and anonymous beauty, two choice specimens complete with their descriptions, whom I was at least sure of procuring for myself when I wanted! I deferred the moment of starting on this twofold pleasure, as I did that of working, but the certainty of enjoying it whenever I wanted excused me almost from taking it, like the sleeping pills that it is enough to have within reach of our hand for us no longer to need them but to fall asleep.

The following victims are tagged, standard disclaimers apply: Marjorie, La Belette Rouge, Colleen. And LBR, I apologize for not changing the page from 123 to 122, for contained in the five sentences was a mention of -- you guessed it -- red shoes.