Many years ago in my college physics book on some random page was handwritten “gentle reader, I wonder who you are”.
What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
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Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#412OT: HN homepage RIGHT NOW has several great posts/threads — as good as it's ever been.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#413So far has anyone made a necromonicon joke?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#414The wonderful book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki contains a page which is blank except for a drawing of a fly in one corner. Nowhere else in the book is it mentioned or any explanation provided. Having practiced Zen for 10 years, I have an idea that might explain it. But on the surface, it is completely strange and inexplicable.
It being inexplicable is the explanation.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
This scene was incredibly strong in Norway back in the days, speaking as a then-teenager there.
These days this would not fly... The risk of dropping a kid at some stranger's house all alone with a few floppies or tapes in this day and age could get a parent a stern visit from social services. But it was acceptable in the 80s...
nonsense. as soon as i have an address and a name, they are not a stranger anymore. i know exactly where my kids are, and no social services can tell me who i am allowed to trust and associate with.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the sixth book, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince". But if I recall correctly, the original owner of the book, the Half-Blood Prince, was none other than Snape, not Voldemort.
God I thought that was such a weird book. It attempts to build loads of tension around the idea that an old textbook has gasp prewritten notes in it. I know that it tries to imply it might be Voldemort's textbook but even if it was... would that be a huge deal unless it had something useful/interesting specifically about Voldemort? For me at least that part of it fell spectacularly flat
All the HP books were like that.
In most cases, somebody just doing the obvious thing at the beginning of the book would have left nothing to write about in the rest. So, they just didn't do that thing.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#417I once took a critical thinking course and bought the textbook 2nd hand from the college bookstore. A week or two in, I noticed half of a sentence written in the margin. As the professor started teaching the topic from that page, he rhetorically asked a question, did not get an answer, and then answered himself with the sentence from the book. I filliped ahead and found that the entire book was annotated with all of…
Reminds me of a geology professor I had in college. She had a fully photographic memory and recited the entire book, word for word, front to back during class without anything at her lectern. As impressive as that was, it's also what made me skip her class except for tests, because what's the point?
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Over his whole career as a professor, my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test he ever gave and was careful to never ask the same question twice.
Yeah. Tests are broken :-) Oral examination is way superior but you need a healthy “students to prof” ratio for that
My discrete mathematics course had an oral exam for the final exam. I took it as a summer course and the books didn’t arrive until 1/3 into the class’s.
I felt like I was BSing my entire oral exam but got an A.
I was never the same after that course. 10 hours a day of logical homework fundamentally changed how I thought.
To this day I still cringe when people use phrases like everyone or all without actually meaning the set of everyone in existence.
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#419I am not trolling here, just for posterity. =) I once bought about a dozen Doctor Who paperbacks at a garage sale. This was probably 1995. Half of them contained mysterious hand-written notes which related to "keys". Cryptic sentences on each paper like, "The fifth key is hard to find, and has many chilly neighbors". To this day, I have no idea what it was about. Maybe the books and notes are on a shelf at my parent'…
Hidden in the fridge somewhere
It was in the fridge, next to the cold ones!
Re: What’s the strangest thing you ever found in a book?
#420Years ago, I went into this third hand style book shop. It is located in the bottom of a church basement in the Midwest. It is the type of place you can get a grocery bag full of books for $30. Oddly, they also had some full sets of various encyclopedia books for free. I thought it could be an interesting set to have around so I grabbed one. It was a New Illustrated Columbia Encyclopedia 1975. Months later, I was loo…
One Rhonda Sollberger is fairly easily found on Facebook via Google (different last name currently). The others are trickier.
Stop that, please. Some things are genuinely better left as is.
Is it just me, or is anyone else upset that mystery just can't exist anymore. Everything has to have a connection. It's just depressing.