Random books

Found this meme in some Finnish blogs. Take five books from the scond shelf from the up, on the right side ...
1. First sentence from the first book.
2. Last sentence of the page 50 from the second book.
3. Second sentence of the page 100 from the third book.
4. Last sentence of the page 150 from the fourth book.
5. The last sentence of the fifth book.
6. Put them in line.
7. Name the sources.


Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse; now and again crack the hard nutshell of an argument of Aquinas, or catch suddenly the shining meaning of a bizarre Eskimo fairy tale: it will be always the one, shapeshifting yet marvellously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced that will ever be known or told. While it is true that in The Divine Comedy we find ourselves in a world populated by demons and angels, that we climb down the body of Satan and converse with the dead, we must remember that for Christians of late Middle Ages all this was part of their reality. Every so often one howls in boredom. All I can say is that many people might end up much happier by staring out to grow a small, unprofitable, sustainable web-based cultural enterprise, than to invite the pressure-toward-hypergrowth that accompanies venture capital financing. What?!


- Joseph Campbell: the hero with a thousand faces
- Margaret Wertheim: the pearly gates of cyberspace, a history of space from Dante to the internet
- Andrew Leonard: bots, the origin of new spieces
- Readme! filtered by nettime, ascii culture and the revenge of knowledge
- Jennifer Saunders: Absolutely Fabulous 2

Ok, I cheated a bit: I took first five English books from that shelf. No energy for translation this morning.