First lines of books
Jul. 13th, 2008 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wellinghallAll you have to do is guess the book or story! Clearly, Googling is cheating. Comments will be screened, to give everyone a chance.
1. Mr Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth - a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self.
2. On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.
3. High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince.
4. No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.
5. One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge.
6. The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
7. There was a boy who lived in a hamlet in Orkney named Hamnavoe.
8. Roy Tappen was always mildly amazed when the security police passed him through the high steel gates into the tightest of all Britain's research establishments, the Nuclear-Utilization Technology Centre, whose inmates alternately pronounced the acronym Nuts or vilely anagrammatized it.
9. She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.
10. Cicely Yeovil sat in a low swing chair, alternately looking at herself in a mirror and at the other occupant of the room in the flesh.
11. The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
12. His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
ETA: Two minor corrections made. I should also say that I have omitted all prologues, forwards, prefaces, introductions &c.
1. Mr Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth - a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centred upon his own silly self.
2. On December the third the wind changed overnight and it was winter.
3. High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince.
4. No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton.
5. One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge.
6. The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.
7. There was a boy who lived in a hamlet in Orkney named Hamnavoe.
8. Roy Tappen was always mildly amazed when the security police passed him through the high steel gates into the tightest of all Britain's research establishments, the Nuclear-Utilization Technology Centre, whose inmates alternately pronounced the acronym Nuts or vilely anagrammatized it.
9. She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.
10. Cicely Yeovil sat in a low swing chair, alternately looking at herself in a mirror and at the other occupant of the room in the flesh.
11. The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended.
12. His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen Trantor before.
ETA: Two minor corrections made. I should also say that I have omitted all prologues, forwards, prefaces, introductions &c.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 10:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 10:56 am (UTC)No idea about the rest of them, I'm afraid! 5. sounds familiar, so I may have read it, but getting the book from the first line just isn't going to happen!
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 12:44 pm (UTC)11. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
12. Foundation
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 01:26 pm (UTC)I know I ought to know what 2 and 7 are, especially 7 (is it George MacKay Brown?), but I don't.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 02:07 pm (UTC)4. Sounds like Douglas Adams.
5. Sounds like Watson narrating Sherlock Holmes!
11. One of the Dune books by Frank Herbert or successors?
Hmm, not very good really. Terrible, one might say.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 04:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-13 08:05 pm (UTC)9) "Neverwhere", by Neil Gaiman - but you've cheated slightly. It's the first sentence of Chapter 1, but I own two editions of the book, the original UK edition and the "author's preferred text" edition, and these start with two prologues and a prologue, respectively, so this isn't really the first sentence of the book. (Unless possibly the original USA edition omits all the prologues and you're quoting from that....)
12) is presumably either one of Asimov's Foundation series, or one of his Galactic Empire novels.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 07:46 pm (UTC)Stab in the dark for 8: Dave Langford's 'The Leaky Establishment'?
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 08:22 pm (UTC)4) Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (which I'm reading at the moment, and was going to grumble that you skipped the introduction when I noticed your ETA.
5) Argh. I've come across this one before but cannot remember what it is.
8) I would hazard a guess at something by Iain (optional M) Banks though I've never read him!
10) I may have to read this if I haven't before, for the wonderful zeugma. The name is faintly familiar.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 12:09 pm (UTC)2) Daphne du Maurier, The Birds;
3) Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince;
4) Bill Bryson's science book, which I diligently read cover to cover and am still none the more educated except that now I know that the geyser in Yellowstone Park, which I always try to call 'Old Yellow', might ASPLODE any moment now and kill us all, and I was happier not knowing. The book's called something like A Short History of Absolutely Everything;
6) I am betting this is Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, although I've never read it;
9) Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere - I think;
10) Saki, but I can't remember the story. It's a long, rather depressing one, I believe;
11) 2001 (Arthur C Clarke) - again, I think?
- which is probably all the same ones everyone else guessed.