Book First Lines Meme--answers
OK, its time for the answers to the meme I did the other day. First off, there were a couple that were never answered, so take one last look to see if you can think of the title...
3. He sat on the floor before the hearth with his knees against his chin, the flames at his back, and warily watched his father's face.
4. The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning.
9. When I was young, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some kind of fairy-tale castle.
Not ringing any bells?
The FAVORITE BOOK 1ST LINE meme ANSWERS:
1. The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley
Guessed by: zannachan, traboule
She scowled at her glass of orange juice. To think that she had been delighted when she first arrived here--was it only three months ago?--at the prospect of fresh orange juice every day. But she had been eager to be delighted; this was to be her home, and she wanted badly to like it, to be grateful for it--to behave well, to make her brother proud of her and Sir Charles and Lady Amelia pleased with their generosity.
This book has been a favorite of mine since I first read it in fifth grade. It was my Very Most Favorite book for years, and it is so familiar now that when I read it, I can almost think the words before my eyes actually pass over them.
2. The Sherwood Ring, by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, traboule
Anyway, I said savagely to myself as I tried to lift a large and very clumsy suitcase down from the baggage rack, anyway, it is my father's old home, and I've always liked antiques, and I suppose an ancestral house is always more interesting than-- "Oh, drat it! Ouch!"
"If you'll allow me, miss," said the conductor reproachfully.
"Thank you... very kind of you... don't know why I can't seem to manage anything today. Are--are we getting near New Jerusalem yet?"
"Only about twenty minutes more now, miss."
Only about twenty minutes more.
Twenty minutes.
I really do wish that Elizabeth Marie Pope could have written more novels. But we only have the two, and I do love them so. I will say that I think The Perilous Gard is the superior book, but really, there is nobody in the Perilous Gard to compete with Peaceable.
3. The Winter Prince, by Elizabeth E. Wein
He sat on the floor before the hearth with his knees against his chin, the flames at his back, and warily watched his father's face. His own face was in shadow, and though the April night was too warm for him to be so close to the fire, he did not move away. He did not want his father to see his face; the shadows made him feel safe.
I love to laugh. A book that can make me laugh gets WAY more points than a book that can't. Therefore, it is very significant to me that I love this book so much, and yet it is not one that will make me laugh. It is a rather serious book, and poor Medraut goes through a whole lot of difficult stuff both before and during the book. But the ending--SO WORTH IT.
4. Crown Duel, by Sherwood Smith
The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room. Dead leaves whispered on the stone floor, and the corners of my moat of papers rustled. Something crashed to the floor behind me. I turned my head. It was the soup bowl I'd set that morning on an old, warped three-legged stool and promptly forgotten.
In some ways I'm surprised this one wasn't guessed, in others I wasn't. I didn't give notice on this one that I'd skipped to the first chapter instead of using the prolouge, and the first sentence is rather short. But I thought that there were a few Sherwood Smith fans who would have thought of it. I've only read this book twice, and I do feel I have to be in a certain mood to read it (can't say why, really) but I really do enjoy it muchly. :-)
5. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Guessed by: traboule
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.
During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night.
And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Greve and made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.
This book has a certain amount of sentimental value for me. It was actually only recently that I read the full, unabridged version. My family owned a few volumes of the Readers Digest Abridged Classics, and this one was among them. Every once in awhile when the mood struck me, I'd take this abridged book, find some hiding spot, and take a few hours to read it in one sitting. I've appreciated it in different ways over the years, but Sir Percy is always amusing. I'm going to see the play this Friday... I'm excited :-)
6. The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner
Guessed by: Te Aroha
Costis sat in his room. On the table in front of him was a piece of paper meant to hold a report on the squad of men he directed. He'd scratched out the first few lines of the report and written underneath the beginnings of a letter to his father. It began, "Sir, I must explain my actions," and then stopped. Costis couldn't explain his actions. He rubbed his face in his hands and tried again to compose his anguished thoughts into cold words and orderly sentences.
How much do I love this book? Well, its hard to quantify. But I will say this: I typed up that paragraph completely from memory. I then reached down to grab the book from my purse beside my chair, and then checked to see that I had it all correct. I was one word off. (One word! What kind of MWT fan am I, to have missed one word?)
Of course, I can only tell you in a general way what is in the next paragraph. My brain chooses odd passages to remember or forget--usually it's only dialogue that I can memorize word-for-word without effort.
7. Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine
Guessed by: Jade, traboule
That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. "My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child."
I stopped.
Such a fun, light hearted, and clever book. Ella is such a fun protagonist, and the twist on the traditional fairy tale is alot of fun.
8. A Wind in the Door
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, Te Aroha
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden."
Meg Murry took her head out of the refridgerator where she had been foraging for an after-school snack, and looked at her six-year-old brother. "What?"
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden. Or there were. They've moved to the north pasture now."
Meg, not replying--it did not do to answer Charles Wallace too quickly when he said something odd--returned to the refridgerator. "I suppose I'll have lettuce and tomato as usual. I was looking for something new and different and exciting."
My third grade teacher read to us every day after lunch. One of the books she read to us was A Wrinkle in Time. I loved the book and read the rest of the series on my own. A Wind in the Door has always been my favorite of the series.
9. Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones
When I was young, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some kind of fairy-tale castle. I could see it from my bedroom window, high in the mountains above Stallchester, flashing with glass and gold when the sun struck it. When I got to the place at last, it wasn't exactly like a fairy tale.
Conrad's Fate is undeniably my favorite of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, and runs a VERY close second to Howl's Moving Castle for my favorite DWJ. It is rather different from the other Chronicles of Chrestomanci in a few ways. It is told in first person. The Chrestomanci or Chrestomanci-in-traning is niether the main character (as in Charmed Life, the Lives of Christopher Chant, and the Pinhoe Egg) or completely absent until he is called in to Fix Everything in the end (as in Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona). And it is awesome and hilarious and I love it.
10. Bloomability, by Sharon Creech
Guessed by: Te Aroha
In my first life, I lived with my mother, and my older brother and sister, Crick and Stella, and with my father when he wasn't on the road. My father was a trucker, or sometimes a mechanic or a picker, or a plucker or a painter. He calld himself a Jack-of-all-trades (Jack was his real name), but sometimes there wasn't any trade in whatever town we were living in, so off he would go in search of a job somewhere else. My mother would start packing, and we'd wait for a phone call from him that would tell us it was time to join him.
He'd always say, "I found us a great place! Wait'll you see it!"
Each time we moved, we had fewer boxes, not more. My mother would say, "Do you really need all those things, Dinnie? They're just things. Leave them."
This book is really the odd-man-out here. Though there are a couple others that aren't fantasy, this is the only modern realistic fiction school story type book to make this list. This is another of those books that must be read when the mood strikes me, but I do love it dearly. The charcters in this book are what make it for me--Dinnie, and Lila, and Guthrie...
11. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Guessed by: magicsandwiches
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the Bishops Bird Stump.
Or at any rate I was. The new recruit was gawking at the blown-out stained-glass windows, Mr. Spivens was over by the vestry steps digging up something, and Carruthers was trying to convince the verger we were from the Auxiliary Fire Service.
I first read this book on the recommendation of some marvelous Sounisians a year or two ago and enjoyed it greatly. But I didn't fully appreciate it until the most recent time I read it, which was a few weeks ago.
Working as an Illustrator, I've found that the day moves along much more easily if I'm listening to an audiobook. (Maybe this is just because I'm a book person, most of my co-workers prefer music.) I've discovered that the easiest way to do this is to use Librivox.org, where books in the public domain are recorded in audio format and made avaliable for free. Of course, they aren't done professionally, so you will get a reader you just can't stand now and again, but all in all its a wonderful resource. Two books avaliable on librivox were Three Men in a Boat and Whose Body?, both of which had been Highly Recommended to me but I'd simply never gotten around to reading them. I listened to both of them, and then my Book Chooser declared that it was time to re-read To Say Nothing of the Dog. I was surprised at how much my familiarity with those books enhanced my reading experience. It was, like, a Whole New Level of Awesome.
12. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, Te Aroha
There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that HE had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what HE was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
Description of this book in three words: Plotless, Meandering, Hilarious.
13. Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Guessed by: Te Aroha, traboule
"And by the way," said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go,"there is a new copy-writer coming in today."
"Oh yes, Mr. Hankin?"
"His name is Bredon. I can't tell you much about him; Mr. Pym engaged him himself; but you will see that he is looked after."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"He will have Mr. Dean's room."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"I should think Mr. Ingleby could take him in hand and show him what to do. You might send Mr. Ingleby along if he has a moment."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"Thats all. And, oh, yes! Ask Mr. Smayle to let me have the Dairy-fields guard book."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
This book made me laugh SO HARD. I would say that it is probably the funniest of all the Lord Peter novels. All the slogans! And the atmosphere of the office, and the thought of Lord Peter actually working... :D
3. He sat on the floor before the hearth with his knees against his chin, the flames at his back, and warily watched his father's face.
4. The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning.
9. When I was young, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some kind of fairy-tale castle.
Not ringing any bells?
The FAVORITE BOOK 1ST LINE meme ANSWERS:
1. The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley
Guessed by: zannachan, traboule
She scowled at her glass of orange juice. To think that she had been delighted when she first arrived here--was it only three months ago?--at the prospect of fresh orange juice every day. But she had been eager to be delighted; this was to be her home, and she wanted badly to like it, to be grateful for it--to behave well, to make her brother proud of her and Sir Charles and Lady Amelia pleased with their generosity.
This book has been a favorite of mine since I first read it in fifth grade. It was my Very Most Favorite book for years, and it is so familiar now that when I read it, I can almost think the words before my eyes actually pass over them.
2. The Sherwood Ring, by Elizabeth Marie Pope
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, traboule
Anyway, I said savagely to myself as I tried to lift a large and very clumsy suitcase down from the baggage rack, anyway, it is my father's old home, and I've always liked antiques, and I suppose an ancestral house is always more interesting than-- "Oh, drat it! Ouch!"
"If you'll allow me, miss," said the conductor reproachfully.
"Thank you... very kind of you... don't know why I can't seem to manage anything today. Are--are we getting near New Jerusalem yet?"
"Only about twenty minutes more now, miss."
Only about twenty minutes more.
Twenty minutes.
I really do wish that Elizabeth Marie Pope could have written more novels. But we only have the two, and I do love them so. I will say that I think The Perilous Gard is the superior book, but really, there is nobody in the Perilous Gard to compete with Peaceable.
3. The Winter Prince, by Elizabeth E. Wein
He sat on the floor before the hearth with his knees against his chin, the flames at his back, and warily watched his father's face. His own face was in shadow, and though the April night was too warm for him to be so close to the fire, he did not move away. He did not want his father to see his face; the shadows made him feel safe.
I love to laugh. A book that can make me laugh gets WAY more points than a book that can't. Therefore, it is very significant to me that I love this book so much, and yet it is not one that will make me laugh. It is a rather serious book, and poor Medraut goes through a whole lot of difficult stuff both before and during the book. But the ending--SO WORTH IT.
4. Crown Duel, by Sherwood Smith
The broken shutter in the window creaked a warning. I flung myself across the table, covering as best I could my neat piles of papers, as a draft of cold wind scoured into the room. Dead leaves whispered on the stone floor, and the corners of my moat of papers rustled. Something crashed to the floor behind me. I turned my head. It was the soup bowl I'd set that morning on an old, warped three-legged stool and promptly forgotten.
In some ways I'm surprised this one wasn't guessed, in others I wasn't. I didn't give notice on this one that I'd skipped to the first chapter instead of using the prolouge, and the first sentence is rather short. But I thought that there were a few Sherwood Smith fans who would have thought of it. I've only read this book twice, and I do feel I have to be in a certain mood to read it (can't say why, really) but I really do enjoy it muchly. :-)
5. The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Guessed by: traboule
A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.
During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night.
And so the crowd rushed away from the Place de la Greve and made for the various barricades in order to watch this interesting and amusing sight.
This book has a certain amount of sentimental value for me. It was actually only recently that I read the full, unabridged version. My family owned a few volumes of the Readers Digest Abridged Classics, and this one was among them. Every once in awhile when the mood struck me, I'd take this abridged book, find some hiding spot, and take a few hours to read it in one sitting. I've appreciated it in different ways over the years, but Sir Percy is always amusing. I'm going to see the play this Friday... I'm excited :-)
6. The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner
Guessed by: Te Aroha
Costis sat in his room. On the table in front of him was a piece of paper meant to hold a report on the squad of men he directed. He'd scratched out the first few lines of the report and written underneath the beginnings of a letter to his father. It began, "Sir, I must explain my actions," and then stopped. Costis couldn't explain his actions. He rubbed his face in his hands and tried again to compose his anguished thoughts into cold words and orderly sentences.
How much do I love this book? Well, its hard to quantify. But I will say this: I typed up that paragraph completely from memory. I then reached down to grab the book from my purse beside my chair, and then checked to see that I had it all correct. I was one word off. (One word! What kind of MWT fan am I, to have missed one word?)
Of course, I can only tell you in a general way what is in the next paragraph. My brain chooses odd passages to remember or forget--usually it's only dialogue that I can memorize word-for-word without effort.
7. Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine
Guessed by: Jade, traboule
That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. "My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child."
I stopped.
Such a fun, light hearted, and clever book. Ella is such a fun protagonist, and the twist on the traditional fairy tale is alot of fun.
8. A Wind in the Door
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, Te Aroha
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden."
Meg Murry took her head out of the refridgerator where she had been foraging for an after-school snack, and looked at her six-year-old brother. "What?"
"There are dragons in the twins' vegetable garden. Or there were. They've moved to the north pasture now."
Meg, not replying--it did not do to answer Charles Wallace too quickly when he said something odd--returned to the refridgerator. "I suppose I'll have lettuce and tomato as usual. I was looking for something new and different and exciting."
My third grade teacher read to us every day after lunch. One of the books she read to us was A Wrinkle in Time. I loved the book and read the rest of the series on my own. A Wind in the Door has always been my favorite of the series.
9. Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones
When I was young, I always thought Stallery Mansion was some kind of fairy-tale castle. I could see it from my bedroom window, high in the mountains above Stallchester, flashing with glass and gold when the sun struck it. When I got to the place at last, it wasn't exactly like a fairy tale.
Conrad's Fate is undeniably my favorite of the Chronicles of Chrestomanci, and runs a VERY close second to Howl's Moving Castle for my favorite DWJ. It is rather different from the other Chronicles of Chrestomanci in a few ways. It is told in first person. The Chrestomanci or Chrestomanci-in-traning is niether the main character (as in Charmed Life, the Lives of Christopher Chant, and the Pinhoe Egg) or completely absent until he is called in to Fix Everything in the end (as in Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona). And it is awesome and hilarious and I love it.
10. Bloomability, by Sharon Creech
Guessed by: Te Aroha
In my first life, I lived with my mother, and my older brother and sister, Crick and Stella, and with my father when he wasn't on the road. My father was a trucker, or sometimes a mechanic or a picker, or a plucker or a painter. He calld himself a Jack-of-all-trades (Jack was his real name), but sometimes there wasn't any trade in whatever town we were living in, so off he would go in search of a job somewhere else. My mother would start packing, and we'd wait for a phone call from him that would tell us it was time to join him.
He'd always say, "I found us a great place! Wait'll you see it!"
Each time we moved, we had fewer boxes, not more. My mother would say, "Do you really need all those things, Dinnie? They're just things. Leave them."
This book is really the odd-man-out here. Though there are a couple others that aren't fantasy, this is the only modern realistic fiction school story type book to make this list. This is another of those books that must be read when the mood strikes me, but I do love it dearly. The charcters in this book are what make it for me--Dinnie, and Lila, and Guthrie...
11. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Guessed by: magicsandwiches
There were five of us--Carruthers and the new recruit and myself, and Mr. Spivens and the verger. It was late afternoon on November the fifteenth, and we were in what was left of Coventry Cathedral, looking for the Bishops Bird Stump.
Or at any rate I was. The new recruit was gawking at the blown-out stained-glass windows, Mr. Spivens was over by the vestry steps digging up something, and Carruthers was trying to convince the verger we were from the Auxiliary Fire Service.
I first read this book on the recommendation of some marvelous Sounisians a year or two ago and enjoyed it greatly. But I didn't fully appreciate it until the most recent time I read it, which was a few weeks ago.
Working as an Illustrator, I've found that the day moves along much more easily if I'm listening to an audiobook. (Maybe this is just because I'm a book person, most of my co-workers prefer music.) I've discovered that the easiest way to do this is to use Librivox.org, where books in the public domain are recorded in audio format and made avaliable for free. Of course, they aren't done professionally, so you will get a reader you just can't stand now and again, but all in all its a wonderful resource. Two books avaliable on librivox were Three Men in a Boat and Whose Body?, both of which had been Highly Recommended to me but I'd simply never gotten around to reading them. I listened to both of them, and then my Book Chooser declared that it was time to re-read To Say Nothing of the Dog. I was surprised at how much my familiarity with those books enhanced my reading experience. It was, like, a Whole New Level of Awesome.
12. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
Guessed by: magicsandwiches, Te Aroha
There were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that HE had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what HE was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
Description of this book in three words: Plotless, Meandering, Hilarious.
13. Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Guessed by: Te Aroha, traboule
"And by the way," said Mr. Hankin, arresting Miss Rossiter as she rose to go,"there is a new copy-writer coming in today."
"Oh yes, Mr. Hankin?"
"His name is Bredon. I can't tell you much about him; Mr. Pym engaged him himself; but you will see that he is looked after."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"He will have Mr. Dean's room."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"I should think Mr. Ingleby could take him in hand and show him what to do. You might send Mr. Ingleby along if he has a moment."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
"Thats all. And, oh, yes! Ask Mr. Smayle to let me have the Dairy-fields guard book."
"Yes, Mr. Hankin."
This book made me laugh SO HARD. I would say that it is probably the funniest of all the Lord Peter novels. All the slogans! And the atmosphere of the office, and the thought of Lord Peter actually working... :D