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

[edith_jones]

1. I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you, he's the one.
   
2. Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - Good. His dad had the pickup going.
   
3. Almost as if the elements, too, mourned the death of the gentle old Harper, a southeaster blew for three days, locking even the burial barge in the safety of the Dock Cavern.
   
4. When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere.
   
5. All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
   
6. You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy.
   
7. I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria.
   
8. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along a road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo....
   

[edith_jones]

Yay! Full points!

So #s 2 & 8 have been guessed, and apparently one cannot edit comments!

[birdgirl78]

5. sounds like O'Brien The Things They Carried
6. Walker The Color Purple

[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!

[knickknackkat]

#5 must be To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee :D

#2 is Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, and I suppose that #9 is The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky ;)

[edith_jones]

#1, perhaps, is The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner, and #8 is Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

[catyah]

Ooh, #8 must be "Huckleberry Finn"!

[edith_jones]

#4 is The Handmaid's Tale, which I just finished reading a few days ago, so it's fresh in my memory!

#5 is Moby Dick.

[knickknackkat]

#5 is Herman Melville's Moby Dick! One of my favourite books of all time. So, officially, you're my new favourite person ;)

And is #9 About a Boy by Nick Hornby? I've read this book sooo long ago.

[trishtrash]

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

[trishtrash]

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