Lit Quiz

Inspired by a guessing game on the Sheila Variations:

Here are the first lines of some of my favorite novels – try to match as many as you can! (And go read any that you haven't already! :)

THE NOVELS:
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – Rebecca Wells
Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years – Sarah L Delaney and A Elizabeth Delaney
The House on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
Pride & Prejudice – Jane Austin
The Red Tent – Anita Diamant
The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
Sula – Toni Morrison
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water – Michael Dorris

FIRST LINES:
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.

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

We didn’t always live on Mango Street.

I learn in this letter than Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.

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.

I sit on the bed at a crooked angle, one foot on the floor, my hip against the tent of mom’s legs, my elbows on the hospital table.

Bessie and I have been together since time began, or so it seems.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

We have been lost to each other for so long.

The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.

When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: “Allez vous-en!”

Sidda is a girl again in the hot heart of Louisiana, the bayou world of Catholic saints and voodoo queens.

“What you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay…”

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, where there was once a neighborhood.