A Little Game of Book Tag

We interrupt our normally scheduled edition of On the Moneyed Midways, which we'll bring you in a special Saturday edition, to bring you the following excerpt of the sixth through eighth sentences from page 123 of the book currently nearest us with more than 123 pages at the invitation of John Palmer!

For the record, we're not interrupting our publishing schedule to accommodate John's request, so much as we're behind schedule this week and need a day to catch up - this just seems to fit our need for space filler. But to business! Here is our three sentence excerpt:

In successive campaigns directly following the Conquest, in 1454 and 1455, his objective was Serbia, the buffer state for which Hungarians and Turks competed. Here he occupied the greater part of the principality, which his father, Murad, had revived after the battle of Varna, took possession of its valuable silver mines, and attached it more closely to the Ottoman Empire. But there still remained an obstacle to his main advance into Hungary - the city of Belgrade, on the Danube.

The passage above refers to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed's military ambitions and is taken from Lord Kinross' The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire.

And yes, that really is the book of more than 123 pages that is nearest to us at the moment (that's not a phone book!) The next closest alternative is Archie Culp's Principles of Energy Conversion, one of the more useful books we own.

To extend John's invitation to five more people, we suspect that we'd find what's on the serious bookshelf of the following people would be really interesting:

• David St. Lawrence
  
• Michael Wade
  
• Gregg Swann
  
• Craig Harper
  
• The Silicon Valley Blogger
  

One last thing - we're not sure how these blog tag games work, but we strongly suspect they're the blogging equivalent of chain letters. While many might believe that bad luck follows those who break the chain, we believe that any bad luck will actually fall back upon the original instigator behind the chain, in exponential proportion to how many people extended the chain. Oh, and to Kevin Bacon too.

Hey, if we didn't create some kind of incentive to see a chain broken, people might keep tagging us!...