Match the first lines to the books from which they came (listed out of order below), email your brillliance to me, here, and win a signed first edition of this. May your fleece be white as snow.

1. “It was always with Sarah this way and that way all over the place, or maybe I never saw enough to understand.”
2. “Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this …”
3. “Exactly when and where was the poet conceived?”
4. “Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room in her own house in Welbeck Street.”
5. “Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.”

[The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope; Life is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera; Run River, Joan Didion; Maybe, Lillian Hellman; The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac]

Helen from New York gets a blender!

(Answers posted tonight or tomorrow. Very busy.)

  For a shot at your own Hamilton Beach Blender, match up the following first lines to their books (listed in scrambled order just below) and email your brilliance here.  

• “There’s an old story people still tell their children in New Mexico.”

• “At McDonald’s, when I’m throwing out the stuff on my tray, there’s a point where I get scared that my wallet could have been on there, too.”

• “This was Frank’s baby.”

• “Shortly after six o’clock on a rainy March evening in 1946, a slender, gray-haired man sat in his favorite bar, the Ritz, finishing the last of several martinis.”

• “When my family first moved to North Carolina, we lived in a rented house three blocks from the school where I would begin the third grade.”

• “Neither of the Grimes’ sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.”

[Rat Pack Confidential, Sean Levy; lenny bruce is dead, jonathan goldstein; Journal of the Dead, Jason Kersten; Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Jeans, David Sedaris; The Easter Parade, Richard Yates; Max Perkins Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg]

Last day of school in Oregon — all the fun, no accountability. Early dismissal, which means I have to make lunch and be moral compass and entertainer for six hours until A. comes home instead of three. Speaking of A., he’s hot all the time all of a sudden. It’s rainy and 50 degrees and he’s sweating and throwing his clothes off and cranking the air conditioner while the rest of us huddle secretly (shivering!) around the gas fireplace in the other room – plagued by guilt! (See An Inconvenient Truth at a theater near you.) Anyway, weird, hmmm. Now first lines. Next time, I’ll make this a contest:

• “You have seen a bird with an orange cap and underparts and a black throat, upper breast, back, and wings, perched on a tree limb in a park.” (Field Guide to Birds: Western Edition, National Audobon Society) — *A. will read this graph because at a glance he’ll think “underparts” says “underpants” and he’ll see “breast”. Hi, A!

• “I’m such a sex machine, I could take a piece of wood and turn it into something erotic, something sensual, something perverse.” (Howard Stern, Miss America)

• “Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me.” (Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum)

• Letter To His Sister, Bonn, 1865: ” … As for your principle that truth is always on the side of the more difficult, I admit this in part.” (The Portable Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann)

• “For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimms’ collection of tales can be an eye-opening experience.” (Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales)

• “I am living at the Villa Borghese.” (Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer)

Wheee, go make cookies!