Hands up all the bookworms! How well do you think you know your literature? Well, here’s a quick test: presented below are the opening lines of 20 influential books (with their original spelling), a mix of canonical and more contemporary titles. See how many you can guess.
1. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
2. “Amerigo Bonasera sat in New York Criminal Court Number 3 and waited for justice; vengeance on the men who had so cruelly hurt his daughter, who had tried to dishonor her.”
3. “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
4. “It was a pleasure to burn.”
5. “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
6. “When he woke in the woods in the dark and cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.”
7. “You better not never tell nobody but God.”
8. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
9. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.”
10. “Here is a small fact: You are going to die.”
11. “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
12. “Under certain circumstance there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.”
13. “Mr Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.”
14. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
15. “It was love at first sight.”
16. “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
17. “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
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18. “I was 37 then, strapped in my seat as the huge 747 plunged through dense cloud cover on approach to Hamburg Airport.”
19. “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
20. “‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die’.”
Scroll down for the answers!
1. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens 2. The Godfather by Mario Puzo. 3. The Outsiders by S E Hinton 4. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradley 5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath 6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy 7. The Color Purple by Alice Walker 8. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson 9. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion 10. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak 11. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 12. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. 13. The Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 14. Neuromancer by William Gibson 15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 16. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 17. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh 18. Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami 19. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. 20. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
