Fun with Books & Lists

The stylish and smart Tish G's Love and Hope and Sex and Dreams is challenging me and a few fellow bloggers to construct a literary meme using the following rules (which Tish in turn got from Kira of Loving Twilight):

Take the first 5 novels from your bookshelf....then do the following
1. Book One - take first sentence
2. Book 2 - the last sentence
3. Book 3 - second sentence on page 100
4. Book 4 - next to last sentence on page 150
5. Book 5 - Final sentence of the book.

Make the five sentences into a paragraph. Feel free to cheat and make it a beter paragraph. Name the sources and then post.

It's a lot of fun, but, as I noted on my comment to Tish, I have a couple of slight dilemmas: so many bookshelves and boxes of books, where do I start? And if worked off only my latest reads, they're both non-fiction*, and the meme says to use novels. On the other hand, I haven't read any of the books Tish made her paragraph from (though I've seen the movie version of Fight Club, of course), so it gives me even more stuff to look for. (Too many books, so little time...)

So I'm going to have to work on this. If anyone else wants to try, please hit "Comment" and let me know what you came up with. I'm especially hoping to hear from Michele, the most voracious reader I know. Michele--feel free to use your latest five books from the library if you like; I know you always have a stack at home.

*Last read: Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers--an amazing collection of connected essays about the lives of corpses (in medical research and much, much, more). She's one of my favorite health/medical writers and she comes through again. (I can't wait to read her latest, about investigating claims about the spiritual afterlife--sort of the flip side of the corporeal Stiff.)

I'm currently reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, about growing up the rootless, poverty-stricken child of a loving yet damaged family in the 1960s. If Walls' name is familiar to you, it's because she's now one of America's most respected celebrity journalists (and in her case "respected celebrity journalist" is not an oxymoron). Quite a personal story, but more important, quite a book, on par in many ways with Angela's Ashes, but much, much closer to home.