Via bobblog, a game to play with books:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

My result? I think I need a judge's ruling. The closest book was Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (Harper Perennial paperback). However, page 23 is the start of Chapter 2, and there are only three sentences on it. One possibility would be to choose the final sentence on the page:

Mucho was sad to see her go, but not desperate, so after telling him to hang up if Dr Hilarius called and look after the oregano in the garden, which had contracted a strange mold, she went.

Another option would be to take the fifth sentence after the start of page 23, i.e. sentence two on page 24:

But it [San Narciso] had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura.

Of course, the strictly accurate response would be Ø, which I think Pynchon would approve. (Geek note: that is really the "O-slash" [& #216;] character rather than a true null-set symbol because the unicode for null -- & #2205; -- is apparently not supported in HTML 4.)