OK, here’s the drill.  Below are opening sentences garnered from ten different, well-known stories, novels, histories, and narratives.  Can you guess where they are from?  Most are very well known, some more than others, however.  I’m not going to include the most obvious literary opening sentences.  You’ll find nothing about a seaman named Ishmael, nor a word about the best of times, or the worst of times.  Still, with one or two exceptions, there is a good chance you have either read the book, read about the book, or seen the book’s film adaptation.  A few are probably pretty easy; a few not.

First some clues. 

• The sentences I have chosen are the opening sentences of the main body of the work.  If the book contained a foreword, preface, or other type of introduction, I ignored the opening sentence of that and went straight to the first sentence of Chapter One.

• One of the selections is from a well known short story.

• Three of the selections are from works of well-known historical non-fiction.

•  All but two of the selections are from the twentieth century.

•  The most recent selection was first published in 1989.

•  Number 10 may be a bit obscure for some.  I have included it because it is one of my favorite books, and I have mentioned it previously more than once on Open Salon.

I will provide the answers Sunday evening in another post.  In the meantime, take a look, and see how many you can name!

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1.  “All children, except one, grow up.”

2.  “When Augustus came out on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake – not a very big one.”

3.    3.    “Sunday, 14^th June, 1942

On Friday, 12^th June, I woke up at six o’clock and no wonder; it was my birthday.”

4.     4.  “The train went up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber.”

5.       5.  “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do:  once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'”

6.    6.  “He had to have planned it because when we drove onto the dock the boat was there and the engine was running and you could see the water churning up phosphorescence in the river, which was the only light there was because there was no moon, nor no electric light either in the shack where the dockmaster should have been sitting, nor on the boat itself, and certainly not from the car, yet everyone knew where everything was, and when the big Packard came down the ramp Mickey the driver braked it so that the wheels hardly rattled the boards, and when he pulled up along the gangway the doors were already open and they hustled Bo and the girl upside before they even made a shadow in all that darkness.”    

        7.  “In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind.”

8.      8.   “In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn.”

 9.    9.   “So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward II of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.”

10.  10.   “Usually, fall is the good time to go to the Brazos, and when you can choose, October is the best month – if, for that matter, you choose to go there at all, and most people don’t.”

        There you go.  How many can you name?  Answers coming Sunday evening!