literary memes?

Literary Meme #1: Stray Thoughts
"1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences (#5,6,7) on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest. No cheating."

My nearest book was in my bag "Soul Survivor - How 13 Unlikely Mentors Helped Me Survive The Church" by Philip Yancey. The sentences come from the chapter about Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoevsky. Two authors I keep feeling inspired to read but never actually getting down to it.

"As I look back now on the cloister of Southern fundamentalism in which I grew up, I wonder if perhaps I suffered from a narcissitic disorder. I saw the world through the shuttered windows of church and family, with no ability to project out of myself and comprehend the viewpoint of, say, a sharecropper in rural Alabama or a Polish immigrant in the Bronx, much less a member of the aristocracy or a peasant in 19th century Russia. Tolstoy threw open the curtains, beckoning me into a world I knew nothing about."

Great book! The opening chapter about pastor turned controversial civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and the closing chapter about Catholic priest Henri Nouwen are truly moving. The last paragraph in the Nouwen chapter is just....phwoar.


Literary Meme #2: 6 Writers who Shaped Your Thinking (and their book that meant the most to you so far)

1) Louisa M Alcott - the Little Women quartet (Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men and Jo's Boys)
2) Anita Roddick - Business as Unusual
3) Paul of Tarsus - First Letter to the Corinthians
4) John Zebedee- The Gospel of John
5) Philip Yancey - What's So Amazing About Grace?
6) C S Lewis - Mere Christianity