It’s International Book Week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title.
“Babies often had no such luck even in places with good sanitation and effective nursing care.”
I could probably do this day. The house book count is pushing 10k right now.
“The fact that Israelite personal names that appear in the Hebrew Bible are overwhemingly Yahwistic might be put down to a later editing, but the inscriptional evidence suggests a similar picture.”
“He is my lover, the father of my child, my future husband, my future king.”
“Among other innovations, the Portuguese developed a versatile, shallow-draft ship, the caravel, which Columbus would use on his 1492 voyage.”
“Should the woman hit him with a stone after he had lost all his clubs, she would lose one of her stones.”
“It would be possible later on to build a station… as an “observational platform” outside the Earth… The work would be done by men who would float in space by means of rocket propulsion units, the nozzles of which they could point in the required direction.”
“A few days after we moved in, Fin put up some shelves to hold the wax anatomical models he had bought cheaply when the wax model maker’s shop closed down and for the scratched glass domes of the stuffed curlew and fox he had bought from the flea market.”
“She was so nice!”
“By and large, one cannot deny certain of mankind’s achievements, such as the invention of lamb chops and central heating.”
“Mark grinned and saluted her with the sticks.”
I call Bill Bryson on this one.
I’m at work right now, and the only books nearby are some that a co-worker laid on me a couple months ago. She said, “You’re a reader, aren’tcha?” and lobbed these two books at me as though any collection of printed pages was just the same as another. Alone, I shuddered and stuffed them into a drawer to rot. So, that said:
“Besides, she really needed to straighten things out with Wyatt.”
I’m also at work, and the nearest book to me is a work book:
In many respects, she was old beyond her years, having experienced the death of her paternal grandfather, a young neighbor, and her first dog by age four.
Find the starting point of a cycle at [theta] = -4, the phase displacement.
The nearest book was a trigonometry textbook, in case you couldn’t tell.
Peter Mayle - “A Dog’s Life”
StG
Nearest nonfiction:
In practice, there is considerable overlap between these two types of immunity; antibodies can direct or activate elements of the innate system, such as phagocytes or complement.
(The two types are adaptive and innate, if you’re wondering.)
Nearest fiction:
“That’s what gnome ointment is for,” winked the Wyvern.
“Some bass clarinets are equipped with extra keys making the low written D, Db and C below Eb possible.”
(That’s the actual sentence, not me bragging about my own bass clarinet which happens to have those extra keys. 
)
Got home, and picked up the nearest book by my computer:
“I obscenity in the milk of thy obscenity.” [sic]
“He told of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping expeditions along its boundaries only.”
He argued with me for some time that he should get the money because he wanted it, but I had to point out to him that desire doesn’t make it so.