A Meme Revisited

A little while back I uncovered a meme where you take a book at random and print out the fifth sentence on page 123. I don't know why, but it's been an obsession with me ever since---a quick way of hopefully summarizing an entire book with a perfectly typical sentence. This is, of course, a scattershot diversion, and it seems to work best with the more brilliant writers who sort of foreground their style. I've spent an undue amount of time this evening flipping through my book collection, and for some reason I felt like sharing the following nicely typical sentences:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita:

“Oh, I’ve been such a disgusting girl,” she went on, shaking her hair, removing with slow fingers a velvet hair ribbon.

William Gaddis, JR:

—We’re not seeing these women wrestling these eels?

Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle:

Boys and girls floated across the floor superglued at the crotch, grinding each other’s privates into powder in a mortar-and-pestle figure-eight motion.

Stanley Elkin, The Living End:

“Call on someone else,” Christ said.

James Morrow, Towing Jehovah:

“But if I had to point a finger, which is not my style, but if I had to point, all I could say is, ‘Your people killed God once before, so maybe they did it this time too.’”

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake:

Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world’s oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument.

Donald Barthelme, The King:

“Myself, I dream of cheese.”