Fun Game...about Books! now with answers!

www.amazon.I don't know how many people are out there reading this but I'm stealing a game from Shannon so hopefully you'll play along.

Here's the rules:
1. Select 5-10 (or so) books you love.
2. Post the first line from each of them.
3. Don't mention the title or author. That's for everyone else to figure out.
4. After someone correctly identifies the book, update the original entry to reflect that fact.


So here are the first lines of some of my favorite books. These are all books I've read multiple times, some many more times than others. A few of them are exceedingly easy, but hey they're my favorites!

1. I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before. Shannon knew one this one! A Separate Peace by John Knowles was one of the first books I had to read in school that I really enjoyed.

2. The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. Melissa knew the other Tom Robbins book on my list, Another Roadside Attraction. It was hard to only put 2 Tom Robbins books on this list. After I read Still Life in 10th grade I had to read everything he had ever written. Thanks for playing!

3. The thing was: one million years ago, back in 1986 A.D., Guayaquil was the chief seaport of the little South American democracy of Ecuador, whose capital was Quito, high in the Andes Mountains. This is the first line of Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut.

4. On one of our last car trips, near the end of my father's life as a man, we stopped by a river, and we took a walk to its banks, where we sat in the shade of an old oak tree. This is the first line of Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel Wallace.

5. They called him Moshe the Beadle, as though he had never had a surname in his life. This is the first line of Night by Elie Wiesel.

6. It was a dark and stormy night. Nice to see my hints really work. Kate just needed a little bit of help and then she realized that this was the opening line of Madeliene L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Hint: This book was first read to me by my 4th grade teacher. Many character names are similar to interrogative pronouns.

7. and it's a story that might bore you a bit but you don't have to listen, she told me, because she always knew it was going to be like that, and it was, she thinks, her first year, or, actually weekend, really a Friday, in September, at Camden, and this was three or four years ago, and she got so drunk that she ended up in bed, lost her virginity (late, she was eighteen) in Lorna Slavin's room, because she was a Freshman and had a roommate and Lorna was, as she remembers, a Senior or Junior and usually sometimes at her boyfriend's place off campus, to who she thought was a Sophomore Ceramics major but who was actually either some guy from NYU, a film student, and up in New Hampshire just for The Dressed To Get Screwed party, or a townie. This very long sentence fragment is how Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis starts off. Thanks for playing Kate!

8. Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. Shannon got the easy one. This is the first line from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling. Even though I'm from the US, it is the Philosopher's Stone not the Sorcerer's Stone as I bought the book in London to read on my flight home.

9. Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon I met so-and-so...was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon." This is the first line of Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden.

10. If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done. This, easily one of the most memorable first lines I have ever read, is from Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins Thanks again Kate!

Good luck! I hope you have fun with them.