 |
|||||||||||
| Home | Greatest Literature of All Time | Toronto Reads | Unsolvable Mysteries | Skepticism | |||||||
|
GREATEST
LITERATURE CONTEST #8
What great literary works start with these lines? (All the works and lines are
mentioned in Winners and answers below. |
|||||||||||
| First line | Another hint | ||||||||||
| 1 | To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. | An easy one to start, as it's obviously a story about a certain detective—but which story? | |||||||||
| 2 | We are at rest five miles behind the front. | Do you get the idea it's something about being on a front, maybe in a war novel? Maybe the greatest war novel ever? | |||||||||
| 3 | The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. | Or maybe this is the greatest war novel. Courage now. | |||||||||
| 4 | "I've watched through his eyes. I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one." | Are you enjoying this game? Do you want to stay with it to the end? | |||||||||
| 5 | When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain? |
You know there's got to be at least one Shakespeare in each of Eric's contests, don't you? Lay on. | |||||||||
| 6 | If the reader will excuse me, I will say nothing of my antecedents, nor of the circumstances that led me to leave my native country; the narrative would be tedious to him and painful to myself. | About a guy who left his native England and ended up...like, nowhere, man. | |||||||||
| 7 | Once when I was six years old I saw a beautiful picture in a book about the primeval forest called True Stories. It showed a boa constrictor swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing. | A little book that would fetch a princely sum if you had a first edition with original drawings. | |||||||||
| 8 | Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by this as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. | The novel that heralded the rise of a great writer out of the "lost generation" of the 1920s. | |||||||||
| 9 | Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. | This anger is about to launch a thousand ships and a ten-year war. | |||||||||
| 10 | The island of Gont, a single mountain that lifts its peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast sea, is a land famous for its wizards. | Another easy one to finish, as this line just about names the book. | |||||||||
|
The winners are William Hatten of Mobile, Alabama; Q.T. Tan of Vancouver, British Columbia; and Ibraheem Mohammed of Washington, D.C. They chose as prizes the books The Red Badge of Courage, Finnegans Wake, and On the Road. Answers: 1. A Scandal in Bohemia 2. All Quiet on the Western Front 3. The Red Badge of Courage 4. Ender's Game 5. Macbeth 6. Erewhon 7. The Little Prince 8. The Sun Also Rises 9. Iliad 10. A Wizard of Earthsea |
|||||||||||
