Brooks, on the other hand, worked with expert subtlety to make the #sonnet her own.

- The Essential #GwendolynBrooks, Introduction

#page42 #poetry

Rules of the game:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Turn to #page42
- Find the 2nd sentence
- Post the sentence in a toot with the hashtag & write the rules as a comment
- Don't look for your favourite, coolest or wittiest book. Go for the closest.

(ETA hashtag)

I was looking around for a book when I realized the closest one was on my phone in my hand! I opened the first book app I could see, Kobo, and tapped the book cover on the top. Given the nature of ebooks, page 42 has shifted again and the current second full sentence is:

"He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days," Brooks writes, and in that shedding and subsequent ornamentation always leaves behind "his desertedness, his intricate fear, the postponed resentments and the prim precautions."

"Don't look for your favourite, coolest or wittiest book. Go for the closest." One of my favorite, coolest books just happened to be literally nearest to hand tho 😎 The book's formatting just happens to be extremely broken in a way I've never seen, even my de-DRM version: The print overlaps unreadably for pages and pages, so much that I've taken to making out the titles and finding the actual poems online 😓 A hazard of trying to format poetry in ebooks? Maybe I should try to fix the de-DRM version, though I hardly know where to start.

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@ljwrites ebooks are mostly just html in a zip file and a special metadata wrapper so this *should* be possible but i am not the person to know how — maybe calibre’s formatting tools could handle it?

@Satsuma I have Calibre installed and have edited ebooks on it before for metadata and poor formatting choices, but I'm no expert on ebook structure and am not even sure how the formatting n this one got broken so badly in the first place. I guess I'll have to dig into the files one of these days with a reference at hand.

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