Fine, I'll do this, but I'm not tagging nobody. :P

[nendil]

Tagged by boggyb:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

The closest book that's not Kevin's calculus book:

---

"I am the less surprised at what has happened," replied Sir William, "for her superior mastery of the deadly arts and high breeding are known throughout the courts of Europe."

Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning but their visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing them in what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, a personal guard of five-and-twenty ninjas, and so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.

When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to Elizabeth:

---

(OMG WHAT DID HE SAY!!)

From Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which I have yet to actually read through because despite zombies and ninjas, it does a good job of reminding me why I never made it past a few pages of Pride and Prejudice in the first place. Did yield a pretty kick-ass excerpt though :D

Comments

[erichowens.livejournal.com]

The closest non-math book, Foucault's Discipline and Punish:

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"Hence the insatiable curiosity that drove the spectators to the scaffold to witness the spectacle of sufferings truly endured; there one could decipher crime and innocence, the past and the future, there here below and the eternal.

It was a moment of truth all the spectators questioned: each word, each cry, the duration of the agony, the resisting body, the life that clung desperately to it, all this constituted a sign.

There was the man who survived 'six hours on the wheel, and did not want the executioner who consoled and heartened him no doubt as best he could, to leave him for a moment'; there was the many who died 'with true Christian feeling, and who manifested the most sincere repentance'; the man who 'expired on the wheel an hour after being put there; it is said that the spectators of his torture were moved by the outward signs of religion and repentance that he gave'l the man who had shown the most marked signs of contrition throughout the journey to the scaffold, but who, when placed alive on the wheel, 'did not cease to let forth the most horrible cries'; or again the woman who 'had preserved her calm up to the moment when the sentence was read, but whose wits then began to turn; she was quite mad by the time she was hanged' (Hardy, I, 13; IV, 42; V, 134).

We have come full circle: from the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime-- or rather it constitutes the element which, through a whole set of rituals and trials, confesses that the crime took place, admits that the accused did indeed commit it, shows that he bore it inscribed in himself and on himself, supports the operation of punishment and manifests its effects in the most striking way."

---

Four sentences, paragraph spacing mine. I wonder if it's as long-winded in the original French.

[nendil.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, and here I didn't finish that last sentence in my excerpt just because it ran on into the next paragraph of exposition XD

But then, other languages. Chinese literature can be atrocious with run-on sentences, but that's just the way it is.

[erichowens.livejournal.com]

You have to wonder how that affects the stylings of the surrounding scholarship. For languages prone to either "run-on sentences" (whatever that might mean in the original language) or just have a sparser density of meaning-per-phoneme/less informational entropy, I wonder if the academics who immerse themselves in these writings end up internalizing (and later using) the properties of what they read.

Not that academics in general are known for their concision or pith, I guess.

[nendil.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that it's just generally true that people tend to start writing with the style(s) that they're exposed to. I know that I write better prose when I've been reading better prose. :)