sure, i'll play

[rone]

Y'all've seen this making the rounds, i'm sure: "Pick ten of your favorite books, look them up on Amazon.com, and find the list of Statistically Improbable Phrases for those novels.  Pick a few SIPs from each book, list them here, and then have people guess what books they are.  (Obviously, using Google or Amazon to figure it out is cheating.)."

• yellow bushes, judicial panel, body exchange
• dragon with twelve, dragon with eight heads, ten heads
• robot girls, fifty knots
• bloated colonel, illegal tobacco, quarter cents (Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", guessed by nyar)
• helicopter screws, emotional engineering, pleasant vices (edited this one because i'd made it a bit too vague)
• senior postman, golden suit (Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal", guessed by velvet_wood)
• riddling beast, early dew (John Barnes's "One for the Morning Glory", guessed by tomscud)
• psychological arrow, more quarks, imaginary time (Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", guessed by mmcirvin)
• spiritual knighthood, subterranean currents, bearded gentleman (Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum", guessed by eejitalmuppet)
• bun compartment, poor momma, minimal wage (John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces", guessed by mmcirvin)

I'm fairly sore that there were no SIPs available for Norton Juster's "The Phantom Tollbooth", Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun", Alan Moore's "Watchmen", or Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash".

Comments

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

senior postman, golden suit = "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yep. All the SIPs for that one were gimmes... i had to try to make it as vague as i could.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

spiritual knighthood, subterranean currents, bearded gentleman

I'm going to guess Jonathan Strange And Mr. Norrell.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

WRONG!

[nyar.livejournal.com]

bloated colonel, illegal tobacco, quarter cents

This is Catch-22. 100% sure.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I bet you're right. That one was bugging me.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ding!

... What the heck is in your icon?

[nyar.livejournal.com]

It is a doodle of a Murloc that I made. That is all.

[khrister.livejournal.com]

[i]spiritual knighthood, subterranean currents, bearded gentleman[/i]

[i]20000 Leagues Under the Sea[/i] by [b]Jules Verne[/b]?

Probably too easy...

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

WRONG!

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

I think the second last one is Foucault's Pendulum. My subconscious keeps nagging me about that bloated colonel and illegal tobacco, but it isn't doing anything more than nag.

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Foucault's Pendulum. (I semi-cheated since I used FP for my own instantiation of this meme).

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ding!

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

riddling beast, early dew

ONE FOR THE MORNING GLORY, John Barnes.

(No "brace of pismires?")

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ding! Strangely enough, those were the only two SIPs that came up for it.

[eqe.livejournal.com]

Wait, what the *heck* are you doing here?

I was so totally not expecting the eqe birdfigment tomscud ronebofh cycle.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

There are only 734 people on the Internet.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

#8 may be "A Brief History of Time".

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ding!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, #10 is giving off familiar vibes. Is it "A Confederacy of Dunces"?

[nyar.livejournal.com]

Ooh! I think you're right.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It sure is!

[pennyhill.livejournal.com]

I would have gotten "senior postman, golden suit" but apparently velvet_wood was much faster than I!

The first one

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

sounds like J.G. Ballard writing a romantic homage to Fred Pohl's "The Day the Icicle Works Closed."