Book Tag

David tagged me in game to pick up the nearest book and quote from it. He said he thought I wouldn't play, probably the best way to get me to take part (even if it took me almost 3 weeks to notice!) The challenge is thus;

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

My book is Alain de Botton's The architecture of happiness, and in these three sentences he's talking about a neolithic tomb in Pembrokeshire;

But what remains to these stones is their eloquent ability to deliver the message common to all funerary architecture, from marble tomb to rough wooden roadside shrine - namely, 'Remember'.  The poignancy of the roughly chiselled family of mossy orthostats, keeping their lonely watch over a landscape around which none save sheep and the occasional rain-proofed hiker now roam, is heightened only by the awareness that we recall nothing whatsoever about the one they memorialise - aside, that is, from this leader's evident desire, strong enough to inspire his clan to raise a forty-tonne capstone in his honour, that he not be forgotten.

The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories.

For an arbitrary quote produced by an algorithm, I rather like it.

I tag Mark W, Saju, Mark B, Andrew and Simon.

Comments

[David]

Dean this is the coolest quote I have seen in this game - very deep I love it.

Thanks for playing!

Also I note from your booklist that you like Patrick O'Brian. I am just embarking on the third and love them - I need a dictionary of Napoleonic naval terms though.

[Dean Ayres]

Thanks, David. It's no surprise that it's a great quote; de Botton has a rare talent for writing dense prose that is also very readable. Every page is eminently quotable.

O'Brian's books are thoroughly compelling. I love the way they create a richly textured world. He writes wonderfully about the community on board ship, is tantalising in his descriptions of intelligence work, and staggering in the breadth of medicine and natural history the books include. I picked up the O'Brian bug from Andrew, whom I tagged above. He's vicar of the church where I was curate, and I he talked about these books a fair amount. I resisted reading them until this he wrote this blog post; http://tinyurl.com/3aywst.

You're right that these books need a dictionary of naval terms (though I doubt Aubrey would agree to calling it 'Napoleonic'!), and A Sea of Words (http://tinyurl.com/33agu9) fits the bill perfectly. It's a lexicon of all the words used in the books.