Shelby's Life and Whatnot

A Literary Meme

Anyone care to guess the last 2?

This is too fun. First lines from books--you guess them! Leave your answers in the comments.

1. "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

2. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun." The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

3. "Clare: It's hard being left behind." The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

4. "Imagine a ruin so strange it must never have happened." The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

5. "When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disageeable-looking child ever seen." The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett

6. "I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning." Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

7. "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

8. "The play--for which Briony had desgined the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding scree tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper--was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch." Atonement by Ian McEwan

9. "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

10. "When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her." Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

And because I'm having fun:

11. "This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it."

12. "My suffering left me sad and gloomy."