I am not making this up

[rachelmanija]

Via vass:

Find the nearest book to you, turn to page 45, and read the first sentence: this describes your sex life in 2018.

There was a violent hammering at the main gate. (Power of Three, Diana Wynne Jones.)

I'm not sure whether to be excited or alarmed.

Comments

[gwynnega]

"Morning is mardi gras." (The White Junk of Love, Again by Sibyl James.)

That's not bad.

[ellen_fremedon]

I've got "Thus a German huntsman will stick a nail taken from a coffin into the fresh spoor of the quarry, believing that this will hinder the animal from escaping." (The Golden Bough.)

[magistrate]

"He was content to stress the modalities, the qualitative feelings of mysterium fascinosum and mysterium tremendum."

Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. I feel like there's a reason I've never made it past the introduction to this book, and the reason is that.

[rachelmanija]

This makes me picture the sex/philosophy of magic scene in Promethea.

[zeborah]

"I hold my siblings tight, one in each arm." (Dove Arising, Karen Bao)

UHHHHHHHHMMMM!

[ivy]

[cracking up] Okay, I found mine mildly distressing, but yours takes the cake thus far. My sympathies!

[scioscribe]

This is an Oedipus-level tragedy in the making.

[genarti]

OH NOOOOO *cracking up*

[nenya_kanadka]

The Comfortable Courtesan, Vol. 5:

Page 45 is intentionally left blank!

Page 44, first sentence:
Alas, she says, Josh is our quiet one; I did not know he was so troubl'd.

Page 46, first sentence:
In the morning Docket brings in a tray with a pot of chocolate and three cups.
[This just after heroine's girlfriend & gf's son have stayed overnight, after aforesaid son Josh ran away from home to visit the heroine.]

HMMM.

[ivy]

"The Bent train stopped in the small outfitting town of Westport, on the Missouri River, in what is now Kansas City." ("Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West")

Well, I certainly hope not!

[rachelmanija]

"Train" and "town" are euphemisms; sounds good to me! From now on my ladybits will be known as "Westport.""

[luzula]

Nitrogen is the main component in proteins, amino acids, and nucleic acids like RNA and DNA. (from book on agriculture)

Ha. Clearly my sex life will remain non-existent.

[indywind]

Or your sex life will involve proteins, amino acids, and DNA.
Could be very ...productive.

[st_aurafina]

Gosh!

[merit]

Well always look to the bright side..!

Two equidistant books an arm's length away

[movingfinger]

I guess they're to be averaged?

Book 1, on the right: "Esa said: 'So my son is leaving you behind? You had better go with him, Nofret.'"


Book 2, on the left: "ELIZA, ANGELICA, PEGGY: History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen to be in the greatest city in the world!"


If I can have my druthers, I'm going with the Schuyler Sisters.

[vass]

Ahahahahaha. That's certainly... evocative.

[schneefink]

I was thinking of reading that book, do you like it?

[rachelmanija]

Yes! It's either the first or one of the first DWJ books I ever read. It has a very compelling atmosphere and a cool plot.

[schneefink]

Agreed, I enjoyed it a lot :)

[graydon]

"The stylesheet may also consist of multiple documents."

Don't think that bodes well.

[rachelmanija]

You gotta think of it as euphemisms. Multiple "documents." Sounds good to me!

[graydon]

In a life filled with awkward conversations, I do not think I have ever undertaken a conversation that would suffice as preparation for trying to express relationship status (or, Great Mother of Spiders, objectives) in terms of the XSL import and include instructions.

So perhaps I shall seek to find "may also consist" hopeful, and leave it at that!

[rattfan]

I got "The problem is trying to work out the increase in water temperature as a result of the Earth warming." [From Living in the Greenhouse by Dr Ian Lowe. The only other book within reach happens to be mine, as in I wrote it and that's even worse because I was discussing architecture.

[calliopes_pen]

"The harpy crouched on her body, hiding it from sight, and the bronze wings turned red."

Should I be worried? That's from The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. Mommy Fortuna getting eaten by a harpy.

(Edit: And I grabbed a copy of Carmilla, since that was near me, too.)

"It would be vain my attempting to tell you the horror with which, even now, I recall the occurrence of that night."

Well, that doesn't bode well either. Heh.

[rachelmanija]

You should be VERY worried. Though not as worried as the person who's holding her siblings tight, one in each arm.

[helen_keeble]

He seemed quite enthused by his grisly work, oblivious of the stark Horror before him.

Well, that's what I get for seeking sex advice from a Warhammer 40k novel.

[rachelmanija]

That sounds like the beginning of all of my dates.

[davidgillon]

By the time Hieronymus had finished, Blysecrag boasted three hundred rooms, eighteen towers, two miles of cellars, five lifts, thirty dumb waiter shafts, a similar number of laundry delivery elevators disguised as wardrobes, a water-powered funicular linking the house to its own railway branch line, a six hundred seat underground theatre with a hydraulically driven revolving stage, numerous fountains and a mile long reflecting lake.

The Business, Iain Banks (possibly my favourite Banks).

So it looks like my sex life will consist of a ridiculous degree of displacement activities. No change there.

[scioscribe]

"Violent hammering" has its advantages, but if the hammerer can't seem to get in, it doesn't speak well of their overall expertise.

[rachelmanija]

This is giving me flashbacks to why I had occasion to angst over whether or not I had actually lost my virginity.

[slashmarks]

Top caption of 45: "Learning how to spell did more than help a girl's vocabuulary, it helped her choose her bra size." First sentence of text: "Suddenly, the bust-designing garment took control of the undergarment world, giving new shape and style to women everywhere."


...okay, that will teach me to use A Century of Lingerie as my lap desk.

[summerstorm]

I picked up my copy of You Are Here by Jenny Lawson cos I thought it'd be funny to do this with a coloring book that was also a gift from my ex. 45 is a drawing, actually, but it does say,

"I don't always remember what happy looks like, but I think it felt like the sun...and tasted like honeysuckle."

That's sweet, I like it. I'll take it.

(The previous page is actual words and Jenny Lawson broke up the first sentence into two fragments, so for the sake of this meme you'd get "Happiness doesn't last forever" but not "and neither does sadness.")

[larryhammer]

Whiff of just-cut young grass, notes of spring
with bracing citrus, distilled and bottled
to create the designer's signature fragrance.

— from "Urban Tumbleweed" by Harryette Mullen,
in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses
ed. by Cecily Parks

Have to say, that's a far better result than usual for this sort of meme. Also, I am very lucky that volume was in front of Origami Made Easy by Kunihiko Kasahara, as that page 45 has no words at all, just diagrams.

[kiphiana]

Bwahaha! (also, this reminds me I haven't read any Diana Wynne Jones for too long...)

Mine is from Curtain Up by Noel Streatfeild. "Anyway, at the moment there isn't any except what we get from the Admiralty, and that, I suppose, is just enough for clothes and food and things."

... interesting.

[likeadeuce]

Mine is, not a joke, "People take them for lesbians, or frigid."

[genarti]

Goodness gracious!

Mine is... well, the nearest book is something on my kobo, but since I'm always reading multiple books on that I'm never sure what to pick. Next nearest is an entire bookshelf, so I'll go with the one on top of the Books Generally In Progress stack:

"À qui ne connaît pas l'appétit, la première morsure de la faim est à la fois une souffrance et une illumination." (Slightly loose translation: "For one who's never known appetite, the first bite of hunger is at once suffering and enlightenment." L'élégance du hérisson (The Elegance of the Hedgehog) by Muriel Barbery.) Goodness. Out of context, it does read rather as if it ought to be accompanied by waggling eyebrows!

[rachelmanija]

I find it hard to believe that's NOT supposed to be about sex!

[indywind]

"I was hopelessly lost." - Falling Leaves, Adaline Yen Mah

It's the next-to-last sentence of a paragraph started on the previous page, though. The first sentence of the first paragraph on page 45 is:

"In those lawless days, children were often kidnapped and disappeared into the bowels of Shanghai."

Ummmm... better use safewords. At least.

[mildred_of_midgard]

"These atomic machines, and the atoms that compose them, are almost unimaginably small."

Since I'm asexual, I'll take it. I imagine if I were a heterosexual female, this would be most disappointing!

Still better than the siblings in each arm.

[rachelmanija]

I think I had a date like that once.

Everything is better than the siblings under each arm.