Here are the first sentences of the books I brought home with me today. How many of them can you identify?
1 - 'So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard.
2 - Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup.
3 - There were years after it happened, after I'd returned from the town and come back here to the busy blank of the city, when some comment would be tossed off about the Second World War and how it had gone -- some idiot remark about clarity and purpose -- and I'd resist the urge to stub out my cigarette and bring the dinner party to a satisfying halt.
4 - Be careful what you wish for. I know that for a fact.
5 - The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane.
6 - Eilis Lacey, sitting at the window of the upstairs living room in the house on Friary Street, noticed her sister walking briskly from work.
7 - When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
8 - My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town's only cinema.
9 - When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along to an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
10 - Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Go on, tell me, which ones do you know? Have you read any of these?
Not easy, Marieke!
ReplyDelete2) Probably not Her Fearful Symmetry, but it's the only one I can come up with.
3) Probably not Atonement.
7) Definitely The Hobbit!!
9) Sounds familiar....
10) Erm... Gormenghast? :-)
Oh dear, I didn't do well. I read The Hobbit which I loved and I read Gormenghast or at least some of it.
I also read Her Fearful Symmetry and Atonement but I doubt that I got that correct.
Very curious to know what the anwers are!
Judith -- Thanks for guessing on these... 2) Your guess was correct! It is HFS; 3) Not Atonement; 7) Not The Hobbit, actually; 9) Hint, famous Japanese author; 10) You're right, the first book of the trilogy.
ReplyDeleteI'll give you all the answers in a day or two. Anyone else want to hazard a guess?
I love this game. Number nine is Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicle. Is Number One Wolf Hall? Number Eight seems crazy familiar but I can't place it. I want to say...something by Salman Rushdie? If Number Seven is not The Hobbit it's got to be The Lord of the Rings.
ReplyDeleteEmily -- Number 9, Yes! What a great opener. Number 1, Yes! Number 8, Not Salman Rushdie. Number 7, Yes, you are correct.
ReplyDeleteI love my stack :)
I only know Fellowhip and Titus Groan. More soon on Lark Rise but I've been travelling, am now behind at work, and returned home to sick kid and sick husband, so am unsure as to when I will be writing. Soon.
ReplyDeleteGreat first lines, by the way.