The Next Best Book Club discussion

Hi everyone!
I thought it was high time for another game, and I have been wracking my brain for one. So here we go.

It is called 'Opening Lines'.
Post the opening line from any novel you've read, and the person to guess it correctly can post one from thiers...

So if I were to say:
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
the person to guess 'Tale of Two Cities' would get to post next....

Have fun!

Shall I kick it off?

"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him."

Oh oh! That's The Road, right?

I read the beginning of that one and it was so haunting that I had to stop. I hope to pick it up again someday when I have fewer mom hormones coursing through my body.

Next:
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

Yay for Zora Neal Hurston! I love Their Eyes Were Watching God.

I love this opening line. I came across it randomly when I was doing TEFL teaching a few years back, and it turned me on to one of my all-time favorite authors:

"Hale knew they meant to murder him before he had been in Brighton three hours."

Brighton Rock by Graham Green





"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must me in want of a wife".

Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austin

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. "

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

"The accused man, Kabuo Miyamoto, sat proudly upright with a rigid grace, his palms placed softly on the defendents table - the posture of a man who has detached himself insofar as this is possible at his own trial."

Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson

"I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne."

"Bastard out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison

Next...

"The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often preplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs ad we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!"

I have two thoughts- Is it The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera?






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

Hint- subject matter of this book is the Holocaust.

Is it The Book Thief? I really should know, lol, as I just read it last month, but I'm not 100% sure! I must admit, I'm not particularly good at remembering quotes etc from a book...

If i'm right then... next...

At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel

"On Friday, June 12th, I woke up at six o'clock and no wonder, it was my birthday." - is actually the real start to The Diary of Anne Frank

At the little town of Vevey, in Switzerland, there is a particularly comfortable hotel
is from Daisy Miller by Henry James


"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day."

haha... didn't think i was right... oh well! I really should read The Diary of Anne Frank.. I never did in school (wasn't on our reading list).

There was no possiblity of taking a walk that day - Jane Eyre.








It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell's 1984.

"Today, Mother is dead."

Is that The Stranger... by Camus? I am too lazy to grab it off my bookshelf...
If i am correcct:

The boy with the fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

you're right, it was The Stranger.

Lord of the Flies by Golding


"What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?"

Love Story by Erich Segal

My turn...

"As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day."

I Was Told There’d Be Cake, by Sloane Crosley

"Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss."

Lathe of Heaven Ursula LeGuin



"Once upon a time there was a woman who discovered that she had turned ito the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups
by Anne Tyler

"At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin."

The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd

CLARE: It's hard being left behind.

Time Traveler's Wife A. Niffenegger
(This was a great book!)



"Where's Papa going with that ax?"

Is it Charlotte's Web?

Yes it is. Your turn.

Ooops, sorry it took me so long to check back!

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
(one of my personal favorites)

"We slept in what had once been the gymnasium."

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood (one of my favorites)

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (haven't read it but I know that line)

"The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through."

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen

I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man.

Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It was Wang Lung's marriage day.

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.

A tree grows in Brooklyn / Betty Smith

"THERE ARE SOME MEN WHO ENTER A WOMAN'S LIFE and screw it up forever."

One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich

"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened.

The Giver written by Lois Lowrey.




All children, except one, grow up.

Peter Pan by J.M Barrie?

From the river, it looked as if two suns were setting over London

The Shakespeare Secret, by Jennifer Lee Carrell

"You didn't see their faces from where you hid behind the maintenance grate."

Warchild by Karen Lowachee

Indian summer is like a woman.

Peyton Place Grace Metalious


I remember finding this book in my grandma's bedroom at a young age and feeling the excitement of reading something that I should not have been reading! Thanks for the great memory, Karen!

"124 was spiteful."

Beloved, by Toni Morrison


The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.

The Thief of Always by Clive Barker

(It's so weird, I just added that book to my "to-read" list yesterday - and one of the GR reviewers specifically talked about the first line.)

The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd of cows who were, to say the least, relaxed.

Tuck Everlasting by Babbit.

Call me Ishmael.

Im going to feel like an idiot if I guess this wrong, becuase it sounds so familiar....

Is it Moby Dick? I have that in my to read pile... Its gotta be Moby Dick...


Kino awakened in the near dark.

:) yes, its Moby Dick.

The Pearl by Steinbeck

here's my opener:

"It was 7 minutes after midnight."