Favorite books meme
Because I never post anything, and I always want to do these memes. Stolen from kitestringer:
1. Choose five of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess.
Revealing the two, sad, unguessed lines.
1. "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
2. "It was a funeral to which they all came. They gathered in the chapel beside the cemetery gate. Six gray horses were hitched to a caisson that would carry the coffin to the grave."
3. "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."
4. "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey."
5. "I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser."
They aren't all necessarily my favorites, but they were the first ones that came to my mind. And Number One is definitely my number one. I actually prefer to read plays and short stories, but didn't want to cheat. And this is a hint, but I'm embarrassed to say that all of the authors are white males. But at least they aren't all straight!
1. Guessed by marinwood, theholyinnocent and rileyc. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Probably a cliche choice, but I adore the writing in that novel. There are still phrases that pop into my head frequently.
2. From Neil Sheehan's "A Bright, Shining Lie," the Pulitzer-Prize winning account of John Paul Vann, an American soldier who started out as an idealist planner and supporter of the war in Vietnam and ended up a disillusioned opponent. A riveting and disturbing look at a hero first admired, then reviled and ultimately vindicated. An American tragedy.
3. Guessed by marinwood. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I hated the book for the first five thousand pages. I kid - I know it's not that long. But it took me forever to get into it, and then once I did, I didn't want to put it down.
4. From "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. I'm going to shamelessly lift from the Amazon review, because I think it really sums up the book. "... this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true." (I love that last line.)
O'Brien also wrote a dark, intriguing murder mystery called In the Lake of the Woods, which is worth checking out.
5. Guessed by marinwood and noir_moll. Naked, by David Sedaris. The man's recollections are hilarious and often poignant. Whenever I read one of his books while taking public transportation, I invariably scare my fellow commuters with inappropriate loud laughter.
1. Choose five of your all time favorite books.
2. Take the first sentence of the first chapter and make a list in your journal.
3. Don't reveal the author or the title of the book.
4. Now everyone try and guess.
Revealing the two, sad, unguessed lines.
1. "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."
2. "It was a funeral to which they all came. They gathered in the chapel beside the cemetery gate. Six gray horses were hitched to a caisson that would carry the coffin to the grave."
3. "On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."
4. "First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey."
5. "I'm thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser."
They aren't all necessarily my favorites, but they were the first ones that came to my mind. And Number One is definitely my number one. I actually prefer to read plays and short stories, but didn't want to cheat. And this is a hint, but I'm embarrassed to say that all of the authors are white males. But at least they aren't all straight!
1. Guessed by marinwood, theholyinnocent and rileyc. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Probably a cliche choice, but I adore the writing in that novel. There are still phrases that pop into my head frequently.
2. From Neil Sheehan's "A Bright, Shining Lie," the Pulitzer-Prize winning account of John Paul Vann, an American soldier who started out as an idealist planner and supporter of the war in Vietnam and ended up a disillusioned opponent. A riveting and disturbing look at a hero first admired, then reviled and ultimately vindicated. An American tragedy.
3. Guessed by marinwood. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I hated the book for the first five thousand pages. I kid - I know it's not that long. But it took me forever to get into it, and then once I did, I didn't want to put it down.
4. From "The Things They Carried," by Tim O'Brien. I'm going to shamelessly lift from the Amazon review, because I think it really sums up the book. "... this sly, almost hallucinatory book that is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three. Vietnam is still O'Brien's theme, but in this book he seems less interested in the war itself than in the myriad different perspectives from which he depicts it. Whereas Going After Cacciato played with reality, The Things They Carried plays with truth. The narrator of most of these stories is "Tim"; yet O'Brien freely admits that many of the events he chronicles in this collection never really happened. He never killed a man as "Tim" does in "The Man I Killed," and unlike Tim in "Ambush," he has no daughter named Kathleen. But just because a thing never happened doesn't make it any less true." (I love that last line.)
O'Brien also wrote a dark, intriguing murder mystery called In the Lake of the Woods, which is worth checking out.
5. Guessed by marinwood and noir_moll. Naked, by David Sedaris. The man's recollections are hilarious and often poignant. Whenever I read one of his books while taking public transportation, I invariably scare my fellow commuters with inappropriate loud laughter.