I generally think this crap is crap. But I did it. But I cheated. I did not select the closest book to me, which is Scott Tennent’s so-far excellent book on Spiderland. Go buy it. WTF Click the fucking link and go buy it. You didn’t buy it. OK, go to hell.
I selected John Gardiner’s The Art of Fiction, because I know him to be acidic and curmudgeonly in the best ways. He would rip the throat out of Stephen King and use it to choke Strunk (or White) to death. If he gave a shit about vastly inferior writers. He doesn’t.
The sentence was classic Gardiner. It was in the section about literary-aesthetic theory:
Yet we notice certain problems that may in the end prove insurmountable.
Isn’t that just a kick in the junk? But it describes life pretty frickin well, doesn’t it?
