Memesday

I need to thank Liv at Madness, Madness I say for awarding me this Perfect Post Award. You can see the other winners for February at Petroville and Suburban Turmoil. I’ve coveted this particular award, and am excited and honored that Liv thought this post was was deserving of it. Thank you!

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A while back, CCE at Mad Marriage tagged me for this literature meme. It is one I’m happy to do, though her take on it was so inspired and thorough that I feel I should just wave you on through to her post. The instructions say that I should grab the book nearest to my left elbow and open to page 123. Then, I should find the fifth sentence on the page and copy the next three sentences after the fifth.

Since it’s frowned upon, in the spirit of this meme, to round up one’s favorite books, I’ve left the stack of books on my desk that were there nine days ago when she tagged me. I’ll pick the top three.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I haven’t read this yet–my friend Mrs. B pushed it into my hands and insisted that I read it. Soon. So I will. Soon. Before she loaned it to me, I had resisted reading it because it got so much attention (I can be stubborn sometimes), but I’m looking forward to reading it now. Here’s the excerpt:

I remember turning my face up to the sky, squinting, breathing like the world was running out of air. I lay on the side of thedirt road next to a rocky trench, looked up to the gray morning sky, thankful for air, thankful for light, thankful to be alive.

The Gathering by Anne Enright. I read a few good reviews of this book and am just 36 pages into it. (I tend to have a few books going at once.) What are the odds I would run up against the sentence that mentions…well, you’ll see. Here it is:

So it was an air hostess’s suitcase I carried down the stairs filled, just like an air hostess’s, with dirty clothes and squeezed-out tubes of spermicidal jelly; in the middle of it all, the tiny, smothered sloshing of a mostly empty bottle of gin.

Bump bump bumpetty bump.

Liam was in some other house, like this one or worse, and he wasn’t having a lot of sex, or drugs, or deep and spacey conversations.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac. And there’s this one, which I am embarrassed to admit I’ve never read. I can’t remember why it ended up on my desk so recently, but it was probably a straggler from a box. Who knows. The excerpt:

“…I was broke. I was sitting at the window of my hotel room on North Clark Street and the most delicious smell rose to my nostrils from the bakery downstairs. I didn’t have a dime but I went down and talked to the girl.”

I’m not tagging anyone in particular, but if you would like to take a pass at this meme, please go ahead. And, really, I don’t know why I’m still sitting here–I have some books to finish. Happy reading.

Tagged as: books, Memes