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first lines

i am perpetuating this meme which i caught from meta. the point is to write down ten opening lines of books and see if you can guess them. so, cmon, guess. to be fair [fair?], i did not include any poetry :]

  1. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
  2. In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square.
  3. Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.
  4. "I have been here before," I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool's-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splednour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
  5. Tao called Tao is not Tao.
  6. Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. [The world is all that is the case.]
  7. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
  8. Make it fast.
  9. Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone hoped it would stay for the big weekend--the weekend of the Yale game.
  10. Gustave Aschenbach--or von Aschenbach, as he had been known officially since his fiftieth birthday--had set out alone from his house in Prince Regent Street, Munich, for an extended walk.

the answers are hidden in white in the extended version...



  1. Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises
  2. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
  3. Zadie Smith: White Teeth
  4. Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
  5. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching [Addis and Lombardo Translation]
  6. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
  7. Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
  8. Eugene O'Neill: The Iceman Cometh
  9. J. D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey
  10. Thomas Mann: Death In Venice

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comments

got 5 and 6 (god, you're a dork), #2 was able to get the author but not the book... which is silly, since I read it.

meta said | April 26, 2005 05:46 PM

Try this:

1. Everybody knows the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or at least they think they do.

2. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

3. Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were-Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a sand-bank, underneath the root of a very big fir tree.

Reb said | April 28, 2005 12:10 PM

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