I have run my own contest along these lines in the past – similar to what we will do with the Movie Guessing Game on Thursday – but just now I came across a thing on American Book Review which listed the 100 Best First Lines of Novels.
I have stripped out the authors in the list below – so why don’t you all have a go at guessing these suckers? Some are obvious – some have the titles of the books IN the sentence – but here they all are. Some of the books I have never even HEARD of – but some of you may be familiar with them.
GO! GUESS! NOW!!!
1. Call me Ishmael.
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
3. A screaming comes across the sky.
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
10. I am an invisible man.
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?Do-you-need-advice?Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard.
12. You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
26. 124 was spiteful.
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.
28. Mother died today.
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man.
32. Where now? Who now? When now?
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. “Stop!” cried the groaning old man at last, “Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.”
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
35. It was like so, but wasn’t.
36. Money . . . in a voice that rustled.
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
38. All this happened, more or less.
39. They shoot the white girl first.
40. For a long time, I went to bed early.
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in.
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane;
44. Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa’s antipodal ant annexation.
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded.
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk.
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
53. It was a pleasure to burn.
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho’ not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call’d me.
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
59. It was love at first sight.
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
65. You better not never tell nobody but God.
66. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.
69. If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
70. Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World.
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.
76. “Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.
80. Justice?You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash.
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
83. “When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.”
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot,” or “That Claudius,” or “Claudius the Stammerer,” or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius,” am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the “golden predicament” from which I have never since become disentangled.
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I’ve come to learn, is women.
89. I am an American, Chicago bornChicago, that somber cityand go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl’s underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self.
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
93. Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue.
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another persona shy young man about of 19 years oldwho, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his unclea journalist, fluent in five languageswho himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young mana long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in schoolthat his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.
97. Hefor there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise itwas in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did.
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
1. Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
2. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
3. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
5. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
6. Anna Karenin – Leo Tolstoy
7. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
9. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
10. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
11. Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathaniel West
12. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
13. The Trial – Franz Kafka
15. Murphy – Samuel Beckett (Ha! I *LOVE* that opening paragraph!)
17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
19. Tristam Shandy – Lawrence Sterne
21. Ulysses – James Joyce
23. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
32. Malone Dies – Samuel Beckett
37. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
40. Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
Yay!! Well done.
After #40 I didn’t do so well.
43. Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Silver Chair – C. S. Lewis
51. Elmer Gantry – Sinclair Lewis
69. Herzon – Saul Bellow
70. Wise Blood – Flannery O’Connor
69. Oops – Herzog, not Herzon
Actually – try again with # 70 and # 47. Other than that – these are all right.
#8: 1984
Actually – #32 isn’t right either – unless the book has multiple titles I’m unaware of??? You would probably know better than I do.
Cullen – Yup! I love that line – so messed up and creepy.
I know 47 is one of the Narnia books. “Voyage of the Dawn Treader”?
70. The Violent Bear It Away – Flannery O’Connor; I was close :)
32. The Unnameable – Samuel Beckett; another near miss
You were VERY close! Yup – Voyage of Dawn Treader and Violent Bear it away (which is, in my opinion, one of the greatest novel titles of all time)
Bryan – yup – Unnameable. (In our case, literally!!)
The literary critic A. A. Alvarez calls it “The Unreadable.”
Is #65 The Color Purple?
Cullen – yup!!
Bryan – hahahahahahahahaha I love that
47 is The Dawn Treader.
87 is I, Claudius
I THINK 58 (the Miss Brooke one) is Middlemarch, but I’m not sure.
53 is Fahrenheit 451
51 is Elmer Gantry (easy enough, if you have had the book on your to-be-read shelf for years)
20 is David Copperfield.
(The one about the clocks striking 13 – which I can’t find again in the list now – is 1984).
The rest either were guessed by previous commenters, or I don’t remember them well enough to be sure, or I’ve never encountered them yet.
ricki –
58 is Middlemarch – you’re right. It’s one of my favorite first sentences ever.
28: the Stranger
curtis: Oui!
Aujourdhi ma mere est mort … or something like that – it’s been 20 years!
#30: Neuromancer
Heh.. Never read it in french sadly. I took it in high school but languages aren’t my strong point…
cullen – yup! awesome first sentence, huh??
4: “Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez
27: “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes
71: “The Tin Drum” by Günter Grass
64: (I’m guessing here) “The Great Gatsby”???
Love this game!!
I wonder why the first sentence of the 10-volume Mission Earth isn’t included in this list. We all know that HE was the best author WHO HAS EVER LIVED!!!
:)
I thought someone had already got 16 – it’s Catcher in the Rye.
14 is “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino. (I figured someone had got that, too)
13 is Kafka – I think it’s The Trial, but I could be wrong.
and I’m guessing on 82 – “I Capture the Castle”? Dodie Smith?
Yup- Great Gatsby.
Bonus points if anyone remembers the advice his father gave!!!
ricki – yup – that one is I Capture the Castle!
No, my head is about to explode, but still I don’t remember the advice (shame!!!)
I loooooove the first line of 100 years of Solitude, too – day-um. Just so so so dern good!!
Ceci – no shame allowed here!! :)
Argh – I think I need to add little notations next to each title that has been guessed … would that be easier? I’m getting confused myself right now …
Okay – I’m gonna put little strike-through marks through every title that has already been guessed – so we can make it easier to see what is still left.
4. 100 Years of Solitude
16. Catcher in the Rye
25. The Sound and the Fury(?)
26. Beloved
50. Middlesex
3 is 100 years of Solitude, Marquez
83–geek love?
Oops, earlier i meant 4, but it got answered anyway. But:
27 – Don Quixote
Siobhan – yes!!! Geek Love! I’m so glad someone guessed it!!
fuck it – the whole strike-through mark thing is WAY too high-maintenance – We must just struggle through without them.
22 is by Bulwer-Llyton, but I don’t know the title.
48 has GOT to be Old Man and the Sea
Hope –
Yup – 25 is Sound and Fury – and 26 is Beloved!
JFH – yup!! Old man and the sea!
Bryan – hahahaha good ol’ Bulwer Lytton. His name lives on in the “bad writing” contest that gives me so much joy!!
You’re right – it’s Bulwer.
Considering the fact that there are already 42 reponses and I am not that literate, I’m just going to watch from the sidelines.
Oops – and I just want to confirm that yes, #50 is Middlesex.
I’m trying to keep up here. I can feel the feeding frenzy occurring AS WE SPEAK.
is 59 catch-22?
I think I’m gonna lose my “shallow reader of fiction” status (not so much on the non-fiction side though) but I’m almost positive that 67 is “The Bell Jar”… Thank God, for English 101
56 should be easy to guess – there are a couple of clues there.
Heh… roninson crusoe??? (56)
yes, my goodness!! 56 is Robinson Crusoe!!!
how could I be so blind?? LOL
I thought for sure someone had already gotten Robinson Crusoe though I believe the Defoe book has a longer original title.
Yup – Robinson Crusoe! I think a lot of these books actually have much much longer names (at least the books written before, say, 1800)
The Terribly Tragic and Ultimately Heroic Adventures of a Young Boy and his Faithful Donkey, etc.
Okay, so I did the strike-out thing. Maybe this will help.
Curtis – UNBELIEVABLE, I’ve read the book like ten times and completely missed #59 as Catch-22, until you pointed it out!!
Sheila – “TS Eliot”
Where the heck is Emily? She would be sure to get # 31.
argh – can’t keep up with you guys –
Yes to Catch 22 – yay!!!! and yes to the Bell Jar. VERY good work!!!
I love that first chapter of Catch 22. I mean, they’re all good, but that first chapter just kicks some serious ass. The obnoxious Texan, the mummy-guy in their ward … and the fact that Yossarian falls in love with the chaplain “at first sight”.
Damn – such a good book!!!
77 sounds like hemingway…
In my opinion –
#75 is NOT a great first sentence (it’s kind of forgettable, actually) – but it’s the beginning to a great BOOK.
If this helps … as a clue …
curtis – Nope. It’s not …
Strangely enough, though, when that particular author died – Hemingway wrote an amazing obituary for him. Very funny, too. This author had a huge influence on Hemingway (and most other male writers alive, actually)
31. Notes from the Underground – Dostoevsky
I kept thinking, “I know I read that somewhere… where have I read that?”
Bryan – yes!!!
Bryan – I think Emily has a different translation of it – she told me what it was … wait, let me think – it was VERY interesting to see the two different translations of that first sentence.
Is 75 “East of Eden”, Sheila?
Strangely enough, though, when that particular author died – Hemingway wrote an amazing obituary for him. Very funny, too. This author had a huge influence on Hemingway (and most other male writers alive, actually)
The style and your comment makes me want to say Jack London, even though I know it’s not.
Ceci – nope!! Guess again!!
cullen – You’re VERY close!!
Cullen – (I’m sure the author in question would completely scoff at my “you’re very close” statement. hahahaha But let’s just say this: it’s the same type of genre, same type of really masculine subject matter, undomesticated nature, etc.)
#89 – The Adventures of Augie March
Dang I was thinking The Sea Wolf too, Cullen… Conrad??
JFH – yes!! Joseph Conrad! Now … er … which one of his books??
Sheila – whoo-hoo! Yup!
Well, it ain’t Heart of Darkness so that really only leaves Lord Jim (‘cus that’s the only other novel I know)
Yup – Lord Jim.
:)
Poo. I hate rehearsal.
I read an amazing article about Saul Bellow once, and there was a whole section about that first line of Augie March and how important it was, to the novel itself and to literature as a whole: a true American urban character, with a wholly American identity and sense of self.
I always get a chill when I come across that line.
Alex – you better not have rehearsal at 3 pm EST on Thursday!!!
Assuming “The Secret Sharer” doesn’t count as a novel, that is.
Sheila – you’re right. It is a spectacular first sentence.
This guessing game is such a wake-up call… I still have so many books to read!
Never read #98, but I think I now need to based on that first sentence alone!
I took ALL DAY OFF on thursday. I’m doing laundry and packing and sitting by the computer. Waiting. Like a loon.
We should have a first-sentence writing contest sometime. I.e., try to write a sentence that would make a great opening for a novel or short story.
Bryan – great idea! I’ll start something up next week.
I have too many contests going on right now. I seriously need to get a life.
Alex:
In the dark.
In the night.
By the town.
Up my ass.
In the night.
The gorgeous #24 is the first line of The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster. (And if we want to get technical, the first volume is “City of Glass.”)
Linus! hi there!!
You are correct, sir!!
Ah, #38 – Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, and high school comes up on me all over again.
haha Love Slaughter-house Five.
Hi back atcha! Good day to drop by, after a long while away. #66, of course, is Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie – a book I should probably read again; it was hard going but very enjoyable on the first time through.
#86 has to be Faulkner, but I’m not sure which one. Grrr. Been so long since I read any Faulkner, it all blurs with time.
Yup – Satanic Verses, and excellent guess about Faulkner. It is, indeed, Faulkner. I actually don’t think I’ve read this particular book. My dad would probably guess it.
86. Intruder in the Dust
That was the hint I needed.
Bryan – Yup!
Bah.. late to the party.. again.. and most of the ones I might have known already identified.. but here goes..
49. is, I believe, Iain Banks.. The Crow Road
N.B. Not the generally superior Iain M Banks – widely regarded for his SF novels..
peteb – you are correct, sir!!
These last unguessed ones are hard, man. Most of them are late 20th century novels.
Now here’s one I know – Iain Banks and Iain M. Banks are the same person. The only Iain Banks I’ve read is Instance of the Fingerpost, which was way fun; I’ve never read his sci-fi.
#46 is one of those gag novels, like the one with no letter “e” or something, right?
Drat it all, the ones I knew are taken. Good on you, Sheila Readers… and it’s back to the library for the ‘fly.
Oh, and the deuce of it is that I feel like I should know 75-78, too.
Oh, of course, 46 – Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish. How did I miss that? It’s not like you could ever forget such a sentence after reading it.
Nightfly – yeah, it must be a gag. The title sort of gives away the gag. Never read it. I don’t like gimmicks. Which is funny since Ulysses is one of my favorite books and Joyce freely admitted filling that book with clues, and ciphers, and language tricks. But he wasn’t just CLEVER. It wasn’t just a TRICK or a GAG. it was genius, it transcends.
Anyway, I can’t judge the book in question (#46) cause I haven’t read it but judging on the first sentence, I probably won’t read it.
Bryan – is it any good???
Ding! Missed #84 the first time through – that’s Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. Ebenezer is about to be named the Poet Laureate of Maryland.
And yes – it’s Alphabetical Africa!
Ssshh Linus!.. don’t tell everyone!
His SF work is wonderful, btw.. but I’ve always been a fan of the genre.
Nightfly – #75 you probably did read. It’s on most high school reading lists (at least it was in my day). The first sentence seems so BLAND to me, though – but the book itself is great!!
Peteb, I love me some good sci-fi. I really am surprised that I’ve never read any of his stuff.
peteb/Linus: question:
He writes two separate kinds of books and adds an initial to his name? Is it kind of a hidden identity type thing???
I’m kind of the wrong person to ask, since I’m such an avant-garde fiction fan that I’d read just about anything that looked weird. It’s not “Ulysses”, but as an experiment it’s interesting, kind of like Queneau’s “Exercises in Style”. I think it’s worth reading. It’s not too easy to find a copy in bookstores, though.
Sheila
Yes, and no. He said at one point he was alternating between SF and contemporary fiction each year.. but he couldn’t keep that up. He just differentiates the genre by using his middle initial for the SF.
I thought it was a great idea.
Oh and 81.. Crash?.. JG Ballard?
Sheila, I’m not sure why. The funny thing is that I was reading up on him in the Wiki the other day and was fascinated by the middle initial thing – I don’t remember why I was in there, but I thought it was an interesting little game to play.
Linus
His Player of Games I thought was particularly good.
peteb: 81 is Crash!!
Linus – it’s totally interesting!
114 comments . . .well, 115, and not one is from me because I’ve not read a one of these books IN MY LIFE.
Stupidity rawks!
I absolutely ADORE sentence #63 – never read the book, but I LOVE that sentence.
Lisa – hahahahaha come on now!!
Woo-hoo!! – 81. “latest car-crash” indeed.
It is interesting, Sheila.. and it may have started as an attempt to imply a separate author.. but, as far as I’m aware, he’s never tried to deflect any questions about his work.
I do remember reading an interview with him where he talked about trying to signify to his readers that this was a different style of novel than they might have expected.
I take that back — is Gatsby on this? I’ve read that. ONE. I’ve read ONE.
I’m always amazed at these sorts of threads because I hardly ever read fiction, and I start to think I’m the only person alive who’s never read Catcher in the Rye.
Yup. Gatsby’s on there, girl!!
Now – first lines of non-fiction books – THAT would be fun and interesting, huh? VERY challenging. I think I need to get on that.
Lisa,
I’ve never read “Catcher in the Rye” either. You are not alone!
Here’s one of my all-time favorite first lines:
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
any takers???
I just … I don’t know why I love it so much – maybe because it’s one of my favorite books – but I love how the author just launches you right into the middle of the action. Great sentence.
And of course there’s also:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
I think that should be on the list as well. Just my opinion!!
Yay, Bryan!
When I was preggers the first time and on partial bedrest, I thought I would spend the time reading all the “classics” I’ve never read before. Because how much Regis can you watch?
I started with Wuthering Heights. I only got halfway through when I started thinking, “This Heathcliff dude is an ASSHOLE. What is her friggin’ DEAL?” and I quit. Thus went the experiment!
//Because how much Regis can you watch?//
That is truly a dangerous question.
Charlotte’s Web!!!!!!
Lisa – yup!! Fern running off to save Wilbur! So so good!!!
Alex is reading it as his Accelerated Reader book this go ’round, and I “stole” it from his backpack and read it cover to cover AGAIN.
And cried AGAIN.
Oh Lisa. I can’t even really THINK about that book. Killer book. Truly! I need to re-read it, it’s been years.
Lisa,
Hahahahaha!
I also loved Trumpet of the Swan.
74 is The Wings of the Dove.
And 98 is Changing Places.
I was wondering why no one had guessed that one yet! Yup!
Anne – yes to 98! I LOVE that sentence … it’s hysterical. Is it a good book?
It feels a bit dated, but is very funny. And I love the description of the game they play called Humiliation.
And now …
Here are all the answers.
No fair. I got here late. #75 is A Farewell to Arms.
Drat! A Farewell to Arms. Somehow I was thinking A Separate Peace, but I knew that was wrong.
18=ford maddox ford The Soldier,,,,
micheal – yes!! I was kind of surprised no one guessed that one earlier – good job!
#29 = Jin’s Waiting
Michael – yup!!
Wow, you’re good. Keep going!!!
#55: A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch?
#76: A Passage to India ?
#97: Orlando?
I know I’ve read other ones, but I can’t. quite. place them. How awful!
Marti – you are correct that 97 is Orlando – good job!
#55 is the first sentence of one of my favorite books – in fact, the title of that book used to be the URL to my old blog on blog-spot!
79 – Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban