THE FRIDAY 56

This Friday meme is hosted by Storytime with Tonya.

Here’s how it works:

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like) along with these instructions on your blog or (if you do not have your own blog) in the comments section of this blog.
*Post a link along with your post back to this blog.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Here’s mine:

By my junior year, I thought I had turned myself into a reasonable model citizen of Peninsula High, but even I was aware that the bar I had set for myself was a low one.  p.56

That is from South of Broad, by Pat Conroy, which I just bought, so it happened to be sitting atop a short stack on my table/desk.

I’ve been salivating over this one for quite awhile—I so loved Prince of Tides!—so naturally, when Borders was having a big sale, I had to have it.  Never mind that my stacks are still huge.

Here’s a blurb from Amazon:

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy’s first novel in 14 years. In the late ’60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city’s inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach’s son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo’s coterie stormed Charleston’s social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator’s awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group’s love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy’s florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. (Aug.)

What book happened to be nearby for you?  Hope you’ll stop by and share.