Meme for wellinghall

[purplecat]

wellinghall posted the first lines of ten books to his blog and then complained about how unsuccessful we were at guessing them.

I can safely say I can identify none of the books, though I got the feeling, accurately as it transpired, that I should recognise the Beaulieu one.

By way of recompense here are 10 first lines from not entirely randomly selected books to see if this game really is as difficult as we are telling wellinghall it is.

1. The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye.

2. On Monday January the seventeenth early in the morning it began to snow.

3. I stood in the shadows of a deserted shop front across from The Blood and Brew Pub, trying not to be obvious as I tugged my black leather pants back up where they belonged.

4. The girl screamed once, only the once. -- Knots and Crosses by Ian Rankin. Guessed by lukadreaming

5. Waterloo ended a long war, but there remained in England a home front on which many battles were to be fought.

6. Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew.

7. Simon Boulderstone, aged twenty, came to Egypt with the draft.

8. It was a place of ancient evil. -- The Five Doctors by Terrance Dicks. Guessed by hobnobs

9. The world is four thousand years old. -- Learning the World by Ken McLoed. Guessed by iriswildthyme

10. The burnished metal plate outside said 1453 ABC.

Comments

[lukadreaming.livejournal.com]

Grafton's up to about T. I can take them or leave them -- the fact she sets them in the 1980s means they got old quickly, literally and metaphorically.

Paretsky's latest book isn't crime fic -- it's looking at the state of America through a small town. I liked it.

[purplecat]

I think I've read Grafton up to about M (possibly P).

the fact she sets them in the 1980s means they got old quickly, literally and metaphorically.

I remember thinking it a bit of an odd choice when I first noticed that, although the books were appearing at 6 month - yearly intervals they were each set about 3 months apart. It makes Kinsey's life appear unbelievably eventful and makes them seem old-fashioned without, somehow, letting them ride on the nostalgia bandwagon. I would have thought that setting them each a year apart and following her from age 30 - 56 would have been a better choice - but I'm not a best-selling author, so what do I know?

[lukadreaming.livejournal.com]

*g*. My view as well. It's one of those things that probably sounded like a good idea at the time. But the series has gone on for so long that it now seems unnecessarily quaint -- no mobile phones, hardly any computers . . .