Page 123

Janet’s tagged me, kicking and screaming, forcing me to be sociable even in this most isolated medium. For which I’m grateful.

  1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
  2. Open the book to page 123.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the next three sentences.
  5. Tag five people.

Coincidentally, I happen to have just finished The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, which is sitting on our dining room table waiting to be returned to the library. This is a chapterless book nearly devoid of punctuation, which a previous checker-outer obligingly inserted with a red colored pencil.

It’s a post-apocalyptic story of a man and his quite young son, crossing a desolated America, trying to find food, warmth, and safety. It is not the most uplifting depiction of fatherhood, but it is beautiful. Why I—a man disproportionately moved by Hallmark commercials—chose to read this book, I’ll never know.

‘He held it to the light. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis. He tipped the jar and drank and he drank slowly but still he drank nearly the whole jar.’

Let’s see what Mike (though I see he’s on ‘hiatus’), Jungle Pop, Phil, Jason, and, heck, why not the rest of the crew at DadBloggers have to say for themselves.

As tradition has been at Total Depravity, I’ll put a blogfatherly spin on this meme and limit it to children’s or young adult literature, if possible. The closest I can get is The Fellowship of the Ring:

‘They cased me all the way to the Ferry. I have never got over the fright—though I daresay the beasts knew their business and would not really have touched me. Pippin laughed.’

2 Responses

  1. Dan
    Dan at | | Reply

    You are a far braver man than me. I took one look at the back cover and decided that it was one of those books that would keep me awake all night worrying and I quickly put it back on the shelf.

  2. Janet
    Janet at | | Reply

    There. That wasn’t too hard, was it? I haven’t attempted Cormac yet.

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