Yesterday I posted a little game called "Name That Book!", in which I listed the opening sentence of 10 different well-known books and stories.  Today I provide the answers.

I was impressed with how well many of you did.  If I did not have the luxury of putting the game together myself, I am quite sure I would not have done nearly as well as several of you, like Kind of Blue or Sgt. Mom in particular.  Nice job, guys!

So without further ado, here are the answers.  Thanks to all who stopped by!

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

This one is obviously Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie.

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

 I was surprised at how many people knew this one.  It is from Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry.  It is surely one of the great Western novels, and its film adaptation is a masterpiece.

3. “Sunday, 14th June, 1942

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

This is the opening entry for The Diary of Anne Frank.

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

 This is the one short story I included.  I suspect most of you read it either in high school or college.  It is the wonderful post-World War I tale of Nick Adams' return to his Northern Michigan home after the war.  It is, of course, Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River".  

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?'”

Most of you knew this one, and a few of you guessed, and guessed correctly.  It is Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

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.”

This one is perhaps a little more obscure, but not terribly so.  It is E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate.  This is the most recent of my selections, published in 1989.  It was also made into a movie that I liked a lot more than the critics, starring Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, and Bruce Willis.

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.”

Some of you knew this one, or guessed it correctly.  It is the opening of Edward Gibbon's great, multi-volume historical classic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  It dates back to the 1780's, and is still cited today by scholars of the Late Roman and the Byzantine Empires.

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

Another great book that was also made into a great movie: William Styron's Sophie's Choice.  I think the acting by Meryl Streep as an ill-fated Holocaust survivor, and Kevin Kline as her mentally unstable American lover,  are among the greatest performances ever on the silver screen.

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.”

This is the opening of Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, perhaps the greatest historical account of World War I.  Tuchman makes history come alive.

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.”

This is one of my favorite books.  It is the opening of John Graves' Goodbye to a River, a narrative of one man's journey down a remote Texas river.  Graves tells the stories of the men and women who made history in this little corner of America, and describes its flora and fauna with an artistry that would make Thoreau proud.

Thanks again for playing!  Let's do it again sometime!