Monthly Archives: October 2008

This week’s Weekly Geek sounds like a really geek-fest for bibliophiles. Identifying first lines from 100 books. I don’t know about you, but I am up for the challenge. =) My answers are in Purple after each quote.

How many lines can you identify?

Below, you’ll find a list of 100 first lines from books. Our basic project is to identify these.

You can participate to a greater or lesser extent, depending on how many of the optional steps you feel like taking part in.

How to:

1. Look over the list of first lines. How many can you identify immediately? Post these in your blog, with the answer (the book title and author). If you’re not 100% positive of your answer, please google the line to be sure. Otherwise, your wrong answer will be spread around to other bloggers. Step 1 is the most basic step in the project, and you should only sign Mr Linky if you complete this step.

2. If you like, list a few or more first lines without answers and ask your readers if they can identify any of them. It’s fine to list all of them for your readers to look at, if you’re so inclined.

3. If you want to, you can also go around visiting other Weekly Geeks and commenting with the answers to any lines that stumped them. The more WGs you visit, the more will visit you!

4. If you want to take part in a contest to see who can get all 100 lines identified, visit the Weekly Geeks who sign Mr Linky below, take their identified lines from their blogs and post them in your own post. Your own list will grow this way. Please don’t forget to link to any Weekly Geeks whose identified lines you take!

5. If you eventually have all 100 lines identified in your blog post, please email me at dewpie at gmail dot com. Don’t email me if you get all 100 by looking at the blog of someone else who got all 100, though, because obviously that person beat you to it.

6. There is a prize! If no one gets all 100 answers, the prize goes to the blogger who gets the most. If multiple bloggers get all 100, the winner is the first person who emails me a link to a post with all 100 correct answers.

7. I’ll offer the winner a choice of a few of the prizes I was setting aside for the read-a-thon and he or she will get to choose one. These choice won’t be anything donated by other bloggers, though, because those bloggers intended those prizes for the read-a-thon.

A couple rules:

1. If you think you might know the source of some first lines but aren’t positive, it’s ok to google them to double-check, as I said. But googling all of them is cheating! Googling any of them because you’re stumped is also cheating! Googling something like “first lines of books” and getting a bunch of answers in one place is also cheating! The point is to get lots of WG blog-hopping going on, and if someone googles all the lines and posts all the answers right away, then the fun is over. SADFACE.

2. I found all these lines at one website. If you happen upon that site (or a similar one) in your googling, please avert your eyes as soon as you realize it. And please don’t tell anyone else the url of the site. I feel a little unethical posting all the lines from that site here without linking to it, so I’ll be sure to cite my source in next week’s post, when I announce the winner.

Two reminders:

1. There will be NO WEEKLY GEEKS NEXT WEEK. The 24 Hour Read-a-thon will be happening on Saturday. If you want to, you could consider visiting read-a-thon participants as your Weekly Geeks activity.

2. There’s still time to participate in Weekly Geeks #19 and Weekly Geeks #20. Unlike most WG activities, these two are open until October 25th.

I won’t be linking to Weekly Geeks who participated in #20 last week, since it’s still going on.

Here are the first lines:

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