The Top Shelf

Catherine (or originally Look At That Book) has posted a game where you have to guess the book from the first line. Although I couldn’t guess any of hers, it seemed a really fun thing to do, so I’m going to post the first lines of all the books or their prologues on the top shelf of my bookcase (dictionaries/poetry books/random things aside), and you can guess. Some may be a give away, and I have at least one (start of a) series in order, left to right.

1. I was born in the year 1632 in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen who settled first at Hull (abridged).
2. The pretty little Swiss town of Mayenfield lies at the foot of a mountain range, whose grim rigged peaks tower high above the valley below.
3. Mrs Ruggles was a Washerwoman and her husband was a Dustman.
4. 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.
5. This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu.
6. Roger, aged seven, and no longer the youngest of the family, ran in wide zigzags, to and fro, across the steep field that sloped up from the lake to Holly Howe, the farm where they were staying for part of the summer holidays.
7. “Wild Cat Island in sight!” cried Roger, the ship’s boy, who was keeping a lookout, wedged in before the mast, and finding that a year had made a lot of difference and that there was much less room for him in there with the anchor and ropes than there used to be the year before when he was only seven.
8. Peter Duck was sitting on a bollard on the north quay of Lowestoft Inner Harbour, smoking his pipe in the midday sunshine and looking down at a little, green, two-masted schooner that was tied up there while making ready for sea.
9. Steps sounded on the wooden stairs, and counting, “Seven and eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and that’s the dozen.”
10. Monday, monday… can’t trust that day… As the tune played inside my head, gunfire exploded in the cramped underground space around me.
11. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
12. You wouldn’t have known it, but something amusing has just happened.

Some of these I haven’t read in a very long time, some are childhood favourites, and some (or rather, most) are just classic. I’ll be surprised at those of you who can’t name at least half of them.

Tags: book, funny, Question