:booking:
Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
Turn to page 123.
What is the first sentence on the page?
The last sentence on the page?
Now . . . connect them together….
(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

“I need to speak to your parent, dokhtar jan, he said when Laila opened the door.” And the village idiot came running with a knife and tripped and fell on it. “Then Babi’s face was white, and getting whiter, and he was looking at his hands, and Mammy was screaming, screaming, and tearing at her hair.”

Ok, I have no idea what the page actually said, because I’m not that far yet. But I really don’t see what could have happened between those two sentences, except for some disaster of monumental proportions, so that’s what I made up.

:booking:
When somebody mentions “literature,” what’s the first thing you think of? (Dickens? Tolstoy? Shakespeare?) Do you read “literature” (however you define it) for pleasure? Or is it something that you read only when you must?

When someone mentions literature, I think of well-written books, the ones that draw you in and hold you captive until you are through with them, the ones you keep re-visiting, the ones you recommend to others. That includes some Dickens ( A Tale of Two Cities, for instance), but it also includes Gabaldon. The age of the book is not the deciding factor, it’s all about the writing. Therefore literature, as I define it, is definitely something I read for pleasure.

I will get to the Booking Through Thursday question in just bit, but I wanted to review a book for you first. I sat down this weekend with 10 Minute Organizing by Sara Lavieri Hunter. I was really hoping to get some good hints, and I did read the entire book, cover to cover. Those tips never materialized, I am sad to say. First, the woman must live in a house with two closets in every room, and I think her kitchen is the size of Miami. The only things she said to discard were old makeup and old computer files. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that’s not what I am drowning in over here. Everything else goes in it’s own cabinet or shelf. I can tell you from my own experience that there comes an end to the amount of stuff one can organize, and eventually the trash bags must come out.

Also, there were three chapters on parties: holidays, child and adult. The tips were pretty much the same, and I truly think these could be consolidated. When I got to the end of the book, I flipped it over and read the blurb about the author. She’s a mother of one. When I had one child, my home was spotless, too. And I had time to organize everything. Now, things are different, and I am all about the simplify.

The one tip I did pick up was that small notebooks were handy for planning things, and I had read that before, and it’s something I do now, and it truly does help. I even use notebooks to hold my to-do lists, as you know. It is a very rare thing for me to say that a book is a waste of trees, but truly, this one could have been condensed into a couple of magazine articles with no loss of information.