I was a bit skeptical of Will Self's pitch for difficult reading — "some texts are clearly going to be a better jungle gym for the mind than others—and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown" — but he was talking about slogging through whole books, preferably books written by him. Nevertheless, his pitch came back to me just now when I noticed a sentence I'd highlighted in my current reading ("Oblivion"). No need to spend hours in the intellectual jungle gym of an entire novel. I've got a perfect 1-minute — 1-sentence — workout for you. Seriously, time yourself (yourwillself) and get back to me about whether you've augmented your mental musculature (and had any fun along the way):

Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.