Time for a literary quiz.

It's simple: name the work of literature – it will always be a book of fiction – that has this first line. Get them all right, and you're as clever as an English major.

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
2. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
3. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like… and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
4. riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
5. Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.
6. Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
7. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.
8. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
9. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
10. Call me Ishmael.

Easy, right? Just to be sure, click the picture for the answers.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

05.02.18 Front Page

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