First Line Quiz

People collect all kinds of things: some collect coins or stamps; some collect autographs or vintage Barbie dolls. I once cleaned the house of a woman who collected jars of dirt from every place she'd ever traveled.  As a child, my sister collected discarded Popsicle®  sticks: go figure.

I collect first lines of books.

Not just any book nor any old first line will do. I collect those memorable first lines that once entranced me and placed me under a novelist's spell, those lines that still echo hauntingly in my head decades later.

Now with the internet it's easy to find sites that collect and enumerate first lines from the classics and many modern novels. They are fun to browse, but they don't mean as much to me as first lines from books I have read and treasured. So I leave those for others to collect.

Not all of my favorite novels begin with a harmonious opening line, by the way. Some begin with real clunkers (hell, some of my favorite novels took fifty pages or more before I felt comfortable in their company).

I've written about the Bulwer-Lytton Contest for terrible opening lines for imagined bad novels. Now here's a contest of my own: twenty terrific first lines from some of my favorite novels.

Scoring well on this quiz doesn't make you a genius and doing poorly doesn't mark you as illiterate. It's more of a compatibility test. If you do well, we undoubtedly have a lot in common and would have a great deal to talk about.  If not, there's always baseball or band camp.

Here are the first lines without any hints:

1. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
   
2. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
   
3. My wife, Utchka (whose name I some time ago shortened to Utch), could teach patience to a time bomb.
   
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
   
5. The old ram stands looking down over rockslides, stupidly triumphant.
   
6. What's it going to be then, eh?
   
7. All this happened, more or less.
   
8. Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
   
9. It was love at first sight.
   
10. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
    
11. --Totally naked, for God’s sake?
    
12. They’re out there.
    
13. She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.
    
14. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
    
15. My father lost me to The Beast at cards.
    
16. Call me Ishmael.
    
17. All nights should be so dark, all winter’s so warm, all headlights so dazzling.
    
18. This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
    
19. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.
    
20. Mother died today.

So for how many of those opening lines can you identify both the author and the title? No cheating by using the internet or pulling books off your shelves.

On Monday I'll give a few hints, and later in the week I'll give the answers as well my distinctly unconventional scoring system.