morgan_dhu | A Meme

I don't often do memes, but this one is fun.

From

chlaal

Book meme:
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.

The first few are basically for free because they’re so obvious, so I’m going to list ten instead of five. There are a couple that I suspect might be rather obscure, so I’m giving the first two sentences, just to be nice. Oh, and I happen to think that in some cases, the prologue really is the first chapter.

1. Once upon a time when the world was young there was a Martian named Smith.

2. This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.

3. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

4. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.

5. The window of the bus was a dark square against the featureless night. Lea let her eyes focus slowly from their unthinking blur until her face materialized, faint and fragmentary, highlighted by the dim light of the bus interior.

6. Chick with a harp. Her hair was the color of an angry sunset, and it fell to her waist in ripples of copper and red.

7. The river flowed both ways. The current moved from north to south, but the wind usually came from the south, rippling the bronze-green water in the opposite direction.

8. The Khadilh ban-harihn frowned at the disk he had in his hand, annoyed and apprehensive.

9. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.

10. I know I was all right on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I've been told I can't guess because of my unfair advantage (I brought Morgan the books from the shelf). Instead, here are five opening passages from my favorite books. Have fun guessing.

1. Fraser adjusted his spectacles to the angle which he knew would produce the effect of prim stupidity he favoured most.

2. "She may not seem dangerous," the nurse said. Her shoes resounded heavily through the lit hallway.

3. It's a port city. Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red.

4. In an alley of the silent Pennelton compound in Lammintown, a man waited, his hands tucked into his sleeves against the night's chill.

5. She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature.

-- Glaurung

8) At the Seventh Level - Suzette Haden Elgin
9) Always Coming Home - Ursula K. LeGuin

and of course
3) Pride and Prejudice - the inimitable, often imitated, never surpassed divine Jane Austen.

See, you nabbed three of my favorites!

At the Seventh Level was the first of Elgin's books I ever read, way back in the mists of time... it really struck me powerfully, in part for the feminist dystopian aspect, and in part for the poetry. Actually, I had wanted to put on the list another sf book from the same era that also has a strong poetic presence, but David nabbed it first.

Always Coming Home is my absolute favourite Leguin book, and that's saying a lot, considering how much I like so many of her other books as well.

And what can be said of Jane Austen that you didn't alreay say?

A Meme

(Glaurung joins the game)

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