A great first line sets the tone and immerses the reader into the world of the book. How many of these books can you identify based on their first line?

  1. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
  1. “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
  1. “Let me begin again.” 
  1. “It was a pleasure to burn.” 
  1. “In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf.”
  1. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
  1. “History has failed us, but no matter.”
  1. “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”
  1. “The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years—if it ever did end—  began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
  1. “First of all, let me get something straight: this is a journal, not a diary.”
  1. “I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life.”
  1. “Chug, chug, chug. Puff, puff, puff. Ding-dong, ding-dong.”
  1. “It was a dark and stormy night.”
  1. “I lost an arm on my last trip home.”
  1. “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.”
  1. “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.”
  1. “All this happened, more or less.”
  1. “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.”
  1. “The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help. That way even if you sniffle a little they won’t hear you. If anybody knows that you are crying, they’ll start talking about it and soon it’ll be your turn to get beat up when the lights go out.”
  1.  “Hi, I’m the bus driver!”

Answers

Click the title to request them from the catalog!

  1. Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen
  2. Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
  3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
  4. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  5. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
  6. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  7. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee 
  8. Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans 
  9. It by Stephen King
  10. Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
  11. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
  12. The Little Engine that Could by Watty Piper
  13. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine D’Engel
  14. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
  15. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
  16. Holes by Louis Sachar
  17. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  18. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
  19. Monster by Walter Dean Myers
  20. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! by Mo Willems

How many did you guess correctly?

18-20 WOW! Great job! You’re a well-rounded reader!

15-17 Almost there!

10-14 ‘A’ for effort.

6-9 Hey, that ain’t bad! Why not check out some of the books from the list this summer?

0-5 Hang in there! There’s a world of books out there for you to explore!