MadLib Monday 11: 2/15/10

Happy Monday to everyone!  It's early Monday morning, and I'm sitting in my comfy chair with my laptop and coffee, excited to be sharing yet another MadLib Monday with my readers.  I've mentioned this before, but making these MadLibs is pushing me to examine authors' language use--it's amazing what you notice when you're pulling out words and labeling them for their parts of speech and realizing that some weeks the only words you can pull out are nouns while other weeks you get a full variety of words to choose from.  Last week felt verb-heavy, this week noun-heavy.  I find it all fascinating.  I hope you enjoy the challenge of trying to recognize book passages that are missing words. . .  Speaking of which, here is the MadLib list of the parts of speech for this week's passage:

1. noun - singular
2. adjective
3. noun - plural
4. adjective
5. adjective
6. noun - singular
7. noun - singular (same as #1)
8. adjective
9. noun - singular (same as #1)
10. adjective - comparative form (-er)
11. noun - plural (same noun as #1)
12. verb
13. noun - singular (same as #1)
14. adjective
15. noun - singular
16. noun - singular
17. noun - plural
18. noun
19. noun
20. noun - plural
21. noun
22. noun - singular
23. noun - singular
24. noun
25. noun
26. noun (same as #21)
27. noun
28. noun - singular
29. verb
30. verb - present participle (-ing)

After you've seen the list, now you see why I said this week is noun-heavy.  This week's passage was a difficult one to work with because of the number of repeated words and focus on a theme.

As a side note, before I show you the picture and the passage, you might notice that the poll question of the week is not in the sidebar.  For the past few weeks (or possibly longer), I've had a pretty low count of voters.  I wasn't sure if that was because the poll questions were not intriguing enough or if the poll questions were too frequent or what the exact reasons were for the low vote count.  I decided to put the poll questions on hiatus for a while and debut them at less frequent intervals.  Let me know what you think in the comments: Do you like having the weekly poll?  Would you benefit more from a monthly poll?  Or do you think polls are overrated all together?

Getting back to our MadLib business at hand, here is the picture to accompany this week's passage:

They said I was a ___(1)___ addict.  I found that ___(2)___ to come to ___(3)___ with--I was a ___(4)___, ___(5)___ ___(6)___ whose ___(7)___ use was strictly ___(8)___.  And surely ___(9)___ addicts were ___(10)___?  It was true that I took ___(11)___, but what no one seemed to ___(12)___ was that my ___(13)___ use wasn’t any ___(14)___ from their having a ___(15)___ or two on a Friday night after ___(16)___.  They might have a few ___(17)___ and ___(18)___ and let off a bit of ___(19)___.  I had a couple ___(20)___ of ___(21)___ and did likewise.  As I said to my ___(22)___ and my sister and my sister’s ___(23)___ and eventually the ___(24)___ of the ___(25)___, “If ___(26)___ was sold in ___(27)___ form, in a ___(28)___, would you ___(29)___ about me ___(30)___ it?  Well, would you?  No, I bet you wouldn’t!”

Can you guess which book the picture and passage were taken from?

Answer to last week's MadLib Monday: Inkheart by Cornelia Funke.  If you have seen the movie but haven't read the book, I highly suggest you read the book--as it typically goes with movies and books, the book is much better than the movie.  This book is the start of a trilogy, which I haven't quite finished, but I did really enjoy Inkheart for its exploration of the love of books and its magical world where reading books aloud brings them to life.

Happy reading, and happy MadLibbing!