Copycat

Posted By on April 17, 2004 at 11:40 pm

Marching instructions:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

OK, sure:

“She swung broad on the slackening ebb, and Captain Aubrey moved over to the starboard rail, his telescope still trained on Portsmouth.”

Patrick O’Brien, “The Ionian Mission” – eighth in the Aubrey/Maturin series of novels. “Master and Commander” was the first of the series, “The Far Side of the World” the tenth.
[Inspired by WindRider at Silent Running, who has traced the origin of this thing.]

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4 Responses to “Copycat”

  1. Stephen says:
    April 18, 2004 at 3:22 am

    Well OK…anything for late night entertainment…
    “I ran up my account quite a little, but, of course, in the end I lost.”
    “Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator” Edwin Le Fevre, 1923.
    (it’s right here, on my desk)

  2. Spoons says:
    April 19, 2004 at 2:36 pm

    I was gonna do it, but there was no fifth sentence on page 23 of my book, because a chapter ended near the top of the page.

  3. Russ says:
    April 19, 2004 at 3:05 pm

    I gotta say, with the O’Brien novels, getting five complete sentences on a single page can sometimes be challenging. He does tend to run-on – colons, semicolons, and commas galore. Example:

    Perhaps there was not: but after a particularly difficult, severe and abstract passage the last movement ended with a triumphant summing-up and resolution that they could both play again at first sight and that they repeated again and again; and the grave happiness of music was still with Captain Aubrey when he walked on to his quarterdeck in the bright morning to see his stump topgallantmasts and their attendant royals come aboard, followed almost immediately by Tamar’s barge bringing a score of glum but resigned and obviously confident Skates to the larboard side and by a Plymouth wherry with two pink-faced young men, very carefully shaved, wearing identical uniforms, their best, and solemn expressions.

    One sentence.
    And that wasn’t something I had to search for – I opened the book randomly and there it was.
    But dang, they’re good reading… and Peter Weir made a darn good film from them.

  4. Stephen says:
    April 20, 2004 at 1:13 am

    My dear Spoons, I’ve read your site several times and your comments for months—you must have at least one other book close by…

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