Most recently from disdainty; first spied at tofty's place.

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I am afraid that this is going to reveal me once and for all to be a flat character; one might think that nearly all these passages came from the same book.

Pick passages from five of your favorite books. The first book’s passage should come from the fifth page, the second from the tenth, the third from the fifteenth, the fourth from the twentieth, and the fifth from the twenty-fifth. Do not give the titles and see if your friends list guesses the books.

I should say here that I have erred on the lengthy side when it comes to "passages": I hope to woo you to some of these books, and so I want each to tell its own story; unfortunately, this means that I will probably bore you instead. Along the same lines, most of these passages started on pages 4, 9, 14 and so on, and some even ended on pages 16, 21, and 26.

1. "But about these boys and all this Latin and that," added the old gentleman. "Amo, amas, you know, and runnin' about like hooligans: what would you advise?"
   
   "Ah," said A, laying his finger by his nose and winking at the bottle, "that takes a great deal of thinkin' about, if you don't mind my sayin' so."
   
   "Don't mind at all," said B. "Very kind of you to say anythin'. Much obliged, I'm sure. Help yourself to port."
   
   "Good port this."
   
   "Get it from a friend of mine."
   
   "But about these boys," said A. "How many of them are there, do you know?"
   
   "Two," said B, "counting them both, that is."
   
   "Couldn't send them away to Eton, I suppose?" inquired A more cautiously. "Long way and all that, we know."
   
   It was not really Eton that he mentioned, for the College of Blessed Mary was not founded until 1440, but it was a place of the same sort. Also they were drinking Metheglyn, not Port, but by mentioning the modern wine it is easier to give you the feel.


2. How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.
   
   C was making the best pace he could. He did not much like being overtaken by other bicyclists. No-one likes being overtaken by other bicyclists. The difficult conditions (some were blown over) turned the Mill Road into a display of pride.
   
   The year was 1912 so that C's bicycle, a Royal Sunbeam, must have been thirteen years old. It had Palmer tyres, which left a pattern of long lines like wires, on a wet, glass-clear road. He felt better when he overtook a man who, from the back, might have been someone he knew slightly, and turned out in fact to be someone he knew slightly, a lecturer in the Physiology of the Senses, who called out:
   
   "They can't get up again, you know, poor beasts, poor brute beasts!"
   
   He was shouting. It was like sea-bathing. Everyone in turn must swerve to avoid a hat which had blown off and was darting about, crushed and deformed, at random. A whole group went by, then one of them detached himself and was riding alongside.
   
   "D!"
   
   He couldn't hear what D said, so dropped back and came up along the other side, the lee side.
   
   "You were saying?"
   
   "Thought is blood," D replied.
   
   The first man, the acquaintance, caught up once more. They were three abreast.
   
   His words streamed with the wind.
   
   "I was in error. It's sheep that can't get up, sheep."
   
   "The relief of it!" C called back. Now that the rain had stopped for a moment the drops blew off the trees as hard as handfuls of gravel.


3. Significantly, it was not his ordinary exactions which roused the greatest resentment -- his levying toll upon their sea-chests for clean shirts for himself, his appropriation of the best cuts of the meats served, nor even his taking their coveted issues of spirits. These things could be excused as understandable, the sort of thing they would do themselves if they had the power. But he displayed a whimsical arbitrariness which reminded E, with his classical education, of the freaks of the Roman emperors. He forced F to shave off the whiskers which were his inordinate pride; he imposed upon G the duty of waking up H every half hour, day and night, so that neither of them was able to sleep -- and there were toadies ready to tell him if G ever failed in his task. Early enough he had discovered E's most vulnerable points, as he had with everyone else. He knew of E's shyness; at first it was amusing to compel E to recite verses from Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" to the assembled mess. The toadies could compel E to do it; J would lay his dirk-scabbard on the table in front of him with a significant glance, and the toadies would close round E, who knew that any hesitation on his part would mean that he would be stretched across the table and the dirk-scabbard applied. The flat of the scabbard was painful, the edge of it was agonising, but the pain was nothing to the utter humiliation of it all. And the torment grew worse when J instituted what he aptly called "The Proceedings of the Inquisition," when E was submitted to a slow and methodical questioning regarding his home life and his boyhood. Every question had to be answered, on pain of the dirk-scabbard; E could fence and prevaricate, but he had to answer and sooner or later the relentless questioning would draw from him some simple admission which would rouse a peal of laughter from his audience. Heaven knows that in E's lonely childhood there was nothing to be ashamed of, but boys are odd creatures, especially reticent ones like E, and are ashamed of things no one else would think twice about. The ordeal would leave him weak and sick; someone less solemn might have clowned his way out of his difficulties and even into popular favour, but E at seventeen was too ponderous a person to clown. He had to endure the persecution, experiencing all the black misery which only a seventeen year old can experience; he never wept in public, but at night more than once he shed the bitter tears of seventeen.


4. K opened his watering eyes and blinked. Before him and all around was one vast attic, the length and breadth of the whole house, with two grubby windows in its sloping roof. It was piled higgledy-piggledy with the most fantastic collection of objects he had ever seen.
   
   Boxes, chests and trunks lay everywhere, with mounds of dirty grey canvas and rough-coiled ropes between them; stacks of newspapers and magazines, yellow-brown with age; a brass bedstead and a grandfather clock without a face. As he stared, he saw smaller things: a broken fishing-rod, a straw hat perched on the corner of an oil-painting darkened by age into one great black blur; an empty mousetrap, a ship in a bottle, a glass-fronted case full of chunks of rock, a pair of old thigh-high boots flopped over sideways as if they were tired, a cluster of battered pewter mugs.
   
   "Gosh!" said K.
   
   Muffled noises of protest came from below, and he hauled himself out through the opening and rolled sideways out of their way on the floor. L and M came through after him.
   
   "K!" said M, gazing at him in horror. "You're filthy!"
   
   "Well, isn't that just like a girl. All this round you, and you only see a bit of dust. It'll brush off." He patted ineffectually at his piebald shirt. "But isn't it marvellous? Look!"
   
   L, cooing with delight, was picking his way across the littered floor. "There's an old ship's wheel ... and a rocking chair ... and a saddle. I wonder if the captain ever had a horse?"
   
   M had been trying to look insulted, but failed. "This is something like exploring. We might find anything up here."
   
   "It's a treasure-cave. This is what the natives were after. Hear them howling with frustrated rage down there."
   
   "Dancing round in a circle, with the witch-doctor cursing us all."
   
   "Well, he can curse away," L said cheerfully. "We've got enough provisions for ages. I'm hungry."


5. We are one country, and I remain a proud Unionist, happy to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and pledge allegiance, sing about the amber waves of grain, wish I was in the land of cotton, pick my teeth with a carpet tack, be in the kitchen with Dinah, hate to see the evening sun go down, take myself out to the ball game, walk that lonesome valley, and lean on the everlasting arms. I love this country. This is one of those simple dumb discoveries a man makes, like the night I came out of the New York hospital where I, a bystander at my wife's travail, had held my naked newborn six-pound shining-eyed daughter in my two hands, and I walked around town at midnight stunned by the fact that what I had seen was utterly ordinary, everybody comes into the world pretty much like that. In the same spirit, I walk around St. Paul and think, This is a great country and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.
   
   The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron by Halliburton and for the southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. Not even close. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from town and clear-cut the forest and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. Their crusade against government has given patriotism a bad name. And their victory has been accompanied by such hubris as would choke a goat. One Republican columnist wrote that Democrats should give up opposing tax breaks for the rich because working class people don't vote their self-interest, they vote their aspirations and are happy to give big gifts to rich people because they hope to become rich too. A little TV Republican named Tucker Carlson wrote a column saying that if Democrats want to win, they need to (1) talk tough, (2) start their own think tanks, and (3) get a sense of humor. -- (3) Got one, Tucker, (2) got plenty of think tanks, except we call them colleges, and (1) shut your piehole, peabrain, or I'll set fire to your loafers.
   
   Democrats have changed America in simple basic ways in the past fifty years that have benefited everyone. Race has become less and less an issue in people's lives and racism has ceased to become socially acceptable anywhere. Women have moved into every realm of society and this is everywhere accepted without much comment. Equal opportunity in education, employment, housing. There is general agreement on the right to a dignified old age, guaranteed by the state. Democrats led the way in bringing these things about. It's one thing to get into power and do favors for your friends; it's quite another to touch the conscience of a nation. The last Republican to do that was Teddy Roosevelt.

Okay! None of them are particularly sneaky or obscure books, I don't think, though if anyone guesses 2, they have my whole heart. And next up, bowdlerized's 10 things that make me happy, but it's going to have to wait a little while, because this one really took it out of me.