I was preparing the photos for this week's Ten Rupee Book Club post when I remembered that Dan was tagged with this meme, and I hadn't done it yet. The Rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people and post a comment here once you post it to your blog so I can come see!

Now, having not just one but seven at hand posed something of a problem. They were all technically 'nearest' to me, and all but one of them had enough pages to satisfy criterion no. 2. None of the books had the same problem Maija encountered with Good Omens either, so I was stuck. Having to look through them for the book post anyway, I figured I'd do quotes from all seven books, subsituting a quote from page 12 rather than 123 from the one that was slim. Consider this a teaser for the whole post (which should be done by tomorrow). Here goes:

Over the past five years I've been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren't expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird -- and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). "That's it," I said to myself, "enough dawdling!" I looked through a small box of them and chose seven -- none of which I have read -- but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

Oh my.

Steven Brust, he of the magnificent Vlad Taltos books, has just released a Firefly novel.

The best thing is, My Own Kind of Freedom is a fanfic. Yup, completely unauthorised, and released under a Creative Commons licence. Apparently it 'demanded' to be written, which always results in the best stories, I find.

Your moral and religious standpoint on Fan Fiction may preclude you from greeting such news with joy. Me? New Steven Brust work. New Firefly work. For FREE. How can that be a bad thing?

V

The cousins are coming! The Cousins are coming! For the first time since, um, 1992, there are to be guests in the house whom I actually like. Now, ordinarily we'd just leave the house in the mess (read: disaster zone) that it is, but since we haven't cleaned any of our homes thoroughly since about 1992 (we've just shifted piles of junk into boxes, then from house to house and even country to country) we figured it was about time.

So, over the past week or two, Intrepid Elder Sibling Samir and I have been trying to look through the hundreds of boxes and piles of things that litter the house in order to reduce them somewhat.

The concept is simple. You read one of these posts. You put in a comment at the end that says, "Interview me!" and the author of the post sends you five questions -- any five questions -- to answer on your own blog or site. Dan answered some, and a bunch of us asked him to interview us (Spyder, Caren and Big Tony have answered already). Click on read more for my answers, which are, as usual, long and hence have to be broken into multiple pages:

Aishwarya got tagged with this and then proceeded to tag 'You'. "Hey," I said, "I'm a'You'! Or am I a 'Me'? And if she would have tagged "Me" would she have been referring to me or her?"

Anyway, after I took my medication...

I've been tagged!

How could this happen, I just run a blog which three people visit -- in blogosphere terms, I'm the equivalent of a hermit! Perhaps because of this, Dan tagged me. Also, he knows I've only ever read four books in my life, the spoony bard.

Just you wait, Dan, soon this will turn into one of those real blogs, the ones with the multiple chatboards and weather widgets for Botswana and pictures of random furry animals to indicate moods such as 'obfuscated' and 'shiny purple'.