I saw you sleeping with your coat on a hill

[sovay]

From time_shark, a meme. I can't remember if I have done this one before.

Grab the book nearest you. Right now. Turn to page 56. Find the fifth sentence. Post that sentence along with these instructions in your LiveJournal. Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

"They are a form of armadillo, enlarged wood-lice."
—Jane Gardam, Old Filth (2004)

Comments

[sovay]

How are you liking Jane Gardam?

I loved Old Filth—I picked it up for the title, took it home for the detail and oddity of the first few pages, finished it last night. I didn't realize until the afterword that it was intertextual with Rudyard Kipling's "Baa Baa, Black Sheep" and some (shifted forward in time) of his own childhood. I had no more idea of the story than the vague jacket-flap summary. The moral of the story: hunter-gatherer book instincts are always to be trusted.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Yay! Clearly you survive on the book veldt.

Jane Gardam is one of the authors whose new books I just buy. From England, if needs be. I can trust them to be good.

I am very fond of her story collection, The Sidmouth Letters, and of her novels A Long Way from Verona, Bilgewater, and The Queen of the Tambourine, but you won't go far wrong with any of them. She is especially good on adolescent girls and the dotty elderly.

Nine

[sovay]

Jane Gardam is one of the authors whose new books I just buy. From England, if needs be.

She has a new one this year: The People on Privilege Hill. I may return to Porter Square Books for it.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Short fiction. It is good.

Nine