Often, it takes 40 or so pages to really get into a book. Throw out a prologue and a slow start, and you're two score pages in before you really have a feel for the characters and plot, and the pages begin to turn themselves.
It's also said that, for writers, it's a good idea to get 30 or 40 pages for a new book down on paper, then throw those away and let page 40 be the first page of the book.
So, if you want to flip open a book and get a representative page, maybe 40 is a good one to pick. Based on this theory, I was going to do book reviews, using page 40--and only page 40--as the source for my review. Except that page 40 isn't always particularly distinctive, so I kept the idea that a single page can represent an entire book, but for each book I'll pick a different page and use that as my reference material.
Now, some might say extrapolating from a few hundred words, tops, isn't really representative, and it's possible that's right. But I think you can glean a lot about tone, style, and content from what's less than half of a percent of a typical novel. Sure, it might require a bit of creative vision to leap from there to the full conception of a book, but what would be the fun in letting that stop me?
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