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

[trishtrash]

1) My name is Edgar Freemantle. I used to be a big deal in the building and contracting business.

2) This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure and what a Man’s resolution can achieve

3) All night long he would walk the ship, from bow to stern, from dusk until quarterlight, that sticklike limping man from Connmara with the drooping shoulders and the ash-coloured clothes.

4) Alice was beginning to feel very drowsy from having nothing to do.

5) No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.

6) My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.

7) ‘I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’

8) It all began sometime in the last century, in an age when lovers wrote letters to each other sealed up in envelopes.

9) A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hill-side bank and runs deep and green.

10) The blow was such a stunner that it was thirteen years before I could get back on to my feet again.

[trishtrash]

No, but close. It's rather a sneaky one.

[trishtrash]

Yes... it's called Automated Alice and it received mixed reviews, and then attained a sort of cult-fiction status. I liked it, personally; the author, Jeff Noon, had Carroll's voice reasonably well pegged.

[trishtrash]

edith_jones correctly guessed The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins for #2 ... have you read it?

And yes, well done on Regeneration. :)

[edith_jones]

The only one I know here is #2, which is Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White. The others are complete mysteries to me.

[trishtrash]

Yay for getting #2 ... I'm sure you must have read #9, although admittedly the first line isn't all that memorable. And #6 is on your gadgety-bookreader-thing, IIRC.

[edith_jones]

I'm sure #9 is Steinbeck but goodness knows which one - the only one I remember is Tortilla Flat.

#6, after some flipping through what you call my gadgety-reader-thing, is Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I haven't read that yet, being too immersed in the 20th and 21st centuries.

[christina_reads]

#9 is East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

Is #4 Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll?

[trishtrash]

You're very close on both - wrong Steinbeck book (unless they both start the same way, which would be oddly cool - I haven't read East of Eden so I don't know).

The Alice one is rather sneaky.

[catyah]

#1 - Duma Key and #5 -- Cujo.

Gee, I wonder how I ever guessed that. *grin*

[trishtrash]

Well done on #1 (heh) ... actually, #5 isn't Cujo: does it really start that way? I don't seem to have replaced my lost copy yet *grumbles*. It is, however, a horror tale, so half points :)