From Miss Snark:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

Okay, here goes:

In four-dimensional spacetime, the angles in a triangle can add up to more or less than 180 degrees, depending on how precisely the space is curved.

Any guesses as to what it is?

It should be noted that I cheated, three times. The closest book is an ARC that I’ll be reviewing shortly — doesn’t seem fair to quote an unpublished book. The next closest book is “A Crack in the Edge of the World,” and since I’ve been blogging on that lately, it didn’t seem like much of a challenge. Finally, I’m sitting in the kitchen, next to a shelf full of cookbooks, which doesn’t exactly seem to be in the spirit of the exercise.

Update: Come to think of it, I’ve probably cheated four times: I corrected what I think must be a typo in the book, adding the word “than.”

Update2: Does it seem to you that I’m being unnecessarily repetitive in this post? It seems so to me, but I can’t quite seem to figure out why.

Update3: For completeness’ sake, I decided to do A Crack in the Edge of the World too:

These were the trails — from Memphis to California across Texas, from St. Louis to California across Utah, from Hannibal along the valley of the Platte River toward Oregon, and from Chicago up across the peaks of Montana and via the empty rain-shadowed wastelands to the tiny army encampment at Fort Walla — from which the roadbeds for all of America’s future surface links would be formed.

This sentence is illustrative of the quirks of Winchester’s prose: to get to the fifth sentence starting from the top of page 123, you actually have to go halfway down page 124. (Though again, this is somewhat of a cheat — there’s an illustration on 123. But still, the sentence would have ended nearly on the last line of 123, even without the illustration)

Why, oh, why do people write “recommendation” letters like this? Did they somehow miss the clue train? Something similar (though not quite so hilarious) actually happened to me. I had asked my high school journalism advisor to write me a college letter. One day, about two weeks after the letter was due, I happened to notice the letter, signed and ready to send, on his desk. Here was the entire text of the letter:

David has done a good job as editor of the school newspaper, and I expect he will be a good college student.

Thank god I only asked him for a reference for one school (where, not surprisingly, I was not admitted).