New Year Quiz
Happy New Year!
We hope you are having a gentle, restorative few days after the excitement of the last couple of weeks, and whilst you are in a relaxed mood we thought you might like to you sit down with a cup of tea or coffee (and a slice of Christmas cake if you're lucky enough to have any left!)
and enjoy our little literary challenge - visual clues below.
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Send yours answer to katie@lessoeursanglaises.com together with your full name, address and email before 6th January 2020, and we have a delicious prize for the first person, with all 24 correct answers, out of the hat!
So good luck and best wishes for 2020....
Katie, Susu and Carol
24 OPENING PARAGRAPHS OF WELL-KNOWN NOVELS
1. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question.”
2. “On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.”
3. “When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.”
4. “With two double bourbons inside him, he sat in the final departure lounge of Miami airport and thought about life and death”
5. “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
6. “Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse.”
7. “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”
8. “On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the bourg of Meung, in which the author of the Romance of the Rose was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second Rochelle of it.
9. “While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
10. “The drought had lasted now for ten million years and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax.”
11. “Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P--, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.”
12. “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. “
13. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
14. “The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat.”
15. “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. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”
When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.”
16. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury.”
17. “TO THE RED COUNTRY and part of the grey country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grassalong the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover.”
18. “Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes. With the ring of light from his lantern dancing from side to side, he lurched across the yard, kicked off his boots at the back door, drew himself a last glass of beer from the barrel in the scullery, and made his way up to bed, where Mrs. Jones was already snoring.”
19. “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense collection of commodities; its unit being a single commodity.’
20. “Far out in the unchartered backwaters of the unfashionable Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun”
21. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since….”Whenever you feel like critisicing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”’
22. “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
23. “When the east wind blows up Helford river the shining waters become troubled and disturbed, and the little waves beat angrily upon the sandy shores.”
24. “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. “
