An Oldie but a Goodie

[edith_jones]

Choose 10 books that you like. [Or 12, or 7.] In a comment, list the first sentence or so of each of those books. Let other people try to figure out what book that first line is from.

Come back, to cross off books that have been guessed, and to let us know the correct answers and who guessed them.

My list of first lines in comments. Happy

Comments

[lucieandco]

1. Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o'clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed.
2. May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding? I fear you may not be able to make yourself understood by the worthy ape who presides over the fate of this establishment.
3. The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born - we weren't even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg.
4. It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.
5. Mme. Vauquer (née de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel

[edith_jones]

Is #6 Paul Auster's City of Glass?

[lucieandco]

Indeed it is!

[lucieandco]

3 and 7 - yes! 5, however, is rather something else (though the down-but-not-yet-wholly-out of Paris do find lodging in the Vauquer pension) :D

[knickknackkat]

OMG, #8 is Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse! Love this book ^^

#1 is The Idiot by Dostoyevsky, and #5 is Father Goriot by Balzac.

[lucieandco]

YES TO ALL. I am so happy someone got "Billy Liar"!

[knickknackkat]

My father made me love this book. I need to read it again ^^