1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 — first sentence
3. Book #2 — last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 — second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 — next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 — final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.


August 13, 1859, was a hot day in Coucil Bluffs, Iowa. Very seldom was the loney isle visited by a boat from some equally lonely isle of the East Reach, or an adventurous trader from the Archipelago. He wrote twice from there, but it had already been a year now since he stopped writing. The Universe was vast, but that fact terrified him less than its mystery: “Our aim is to transact our necessary business with the Russians, at arm’s length, coolly, shrewdly, without fear and without extravagant hope, and with as much justice as may be possible where there is as yet no agreement on first principles and where the rivals do not live in the same moral order.”

The books:

  • Nothing Like It In the World – Stephen E. Ambrose
  • The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Wizards of Odd – Edited by Peter Haining
  • Childhoods End – Arthur C. Clarke
  • Jubilee – One Hundred Years of Atlantic – Edited by Weeks and Flint