Read any good books lately?

From Bev's blog (http://www.funnytheworld.com/ - darn not being able to hyperlink)

1. Grab the nearest book. If you are currently reading something, that'll be fine too.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your Blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet I know that is what you were thinking!

Here goes:
One feels that Montaigne, Emerson's master, preferred Socrates to Plato, while Emerson's own love went more to the chronicler of Socrates: "The great-eyed Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life." Emerson's definition of being a Platonist is very wide: it included Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Swedenborg and Goethe. I like best Emerson's classification of Hamlet as a Platonist, though I disagree with it: Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakespeare's proper genious that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent of this school.

What I'm actually reading, or will read after I get off the computer is the SPCA Annual Report which has only 14 pages. The above sentence is from the book on my nightstand -- Genius by Harold Bloom. I'm not showing off or breaking rule #5. Honest. I don't know what possessed me to get the Bloom volume. Good value, I suppose, it's thicker than the phone book. I was browsing in a second-hand bookstore and it called to me from the top shelf. Obviously, that's the kind of book that's relegated to out-of-the-way shelves. I have been reading it on and off for the past three months. And that one sentence alone should tell you why it's been on and off and for three months.

In between, I put it aside for John Grogan, Terry Prachett, Anthony Bourdain, Ruth Reichl and Bill Buford. I pigged out on all of them at my last trip to the bookstore and now that I'm done reading them, I went back to Bloom, which had in the meantime gathered a slight layer of dust on the bedside table. It's not really so bad, it's like literary criticism of 100 creative minds -- all of which are dead, Bloom steadfastly refused to include anyone living. The bits on Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Swift, Austen, ie the English geniuses, I breezed through because I was familiar with them but the French, German and Spanish ones were heavy going because I hadn't read much of them. From that one paragraph above, I had to break off and look up Swedenborg. That was when badass kitchen prose from Bourdain etc beckoned me over. Now that I've exhausted all the new books and have not been to the library in a while, it's back to Bloom.