Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Yeah, imagine how frustrating it must've been for our English teachers. "This is brilliant, you little shits, you should be so lucky to get credit for reading it!!!" Still... we were too young.
"There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine." -Patrick Bateman
i read those books in high school and appreciated them! But I know what you mean.
Brentinlouis Wrote: What was that rule about being intentionally annoying?
I was #1 slacker in high school. If I only knew then what I know now. I wouldn't have to feel like I was playing catch up with everything in my life. lol
#2 is Apathy and Other Small Victories
Good job! Awesome book. It's one of the funniest books I've read that actually has a plot.
And the veterans got showed up by a noob!
Off to a good start.
Also, I am pretty sure #1 is Gum Thief..
#4 is without a doubt Jesus' Son. wonderful book.
Finally! Nice work, that's a great book.
"There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine." -Patrick Bateman
i should've made you guys suffer over "Parmesan cheese". but i was getting so annoyed no one had got it yet.
Good job Matt. I thought that one would be the first one to get guessed. Maybe it's because I've read that book so much, it's just easy for me.
That still leaves us with number 5 - which I thought was a pretty easy one too...
Come on guys! I think we even interviewed the author of number 5 (I could be wrong). But the book was hugely popular here maybe last year.
#5 is Crooked Little Vein. Pretty good book 
Good job Irina. You saved it! I thought that one was pretty easy too.
Can I get to choose the next lines?
go for it!
1. Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.
2. The first thing I remember is being under something.
3. A girl came out of lawyer Royall's house, at the end of the one street of North Dormer, and stood on the doorstep.
4. Soon it would be too hot.
5. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
1. is without a doubt American Pyscho
5. The Bell Jar. this morbid book is burnt into my brain.
Right on
hells yeah! i finally got in first. shame i don't know the others.
2. Ham on Rye
That's right.
The only one I recognize is American Psycho. I was gonna do that one on my post, but was too lazy to type it all out. I use the seek-and-destroy typing method! Glad you stepped up.
"There’s no use in denying it: this has been a bad week. I’ve started drinking my own urine." -Patrick Bateman
damn! i haven't read Ham yet. bastardo! like Pete, i'm trying to slow up on my Bukowski.
The last two seem so familiar, but I have no idea...
Some more:
1. She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.
2. Some catastrophic situations invite clarity, explode in split moments: You smash your hand through a windowpane and then there is blood and shattered glass stained with red all over the place; you fall out a window and break some bones and scrape some skin.
3. His long white buck teeth hang out from a smile, like a wolf dog.
4. He always shot up by TV light.
5. We keep burning in the brown smog pit.
Wow... None of those even sound remotely familiar to me.
4. American Tabloid - James Ellroy
Correct sir. And only one of them is kind of obscure (#5), the others i discovered on the cult.
Yeah, none sound familiar to me either.
Bastardo!
1. fantasy
2. memoir
3. short story collection
5. young adult
I finally know one! (At least I'm pretty sure...)
#1 is Neverwhere
"We're developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won't be able to think."
— Rod Serling
"Chuck calls Noah fortnightly on his bakelite rotary phone and gives him publisher's insider information and stock tips."- Tuffy
Yep.
2. Prozac Nation
3. The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
5. Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block
You gave up on waiting for us to guess? lol
I read Prozac Nation a few months ago... That line was the only one that seemed vaguely familiar. But still I was clueless.
okay, new round:
1. It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago--I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman--when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.
2. 1. Form he possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.
3. Though brilliantly sunny, Saturday morning was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend - the weekend of the Yale game.
4. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in th dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
5. My father showed me how to hurt a man one August night at the Torch Drive-in when I was seven years old.
2 is The Elements of Style ya fuck!
4 City of Glass in The New York Trilogy (I don't even know why this one stuck out... Maybe it was because I was recently flipping through it the other day bored at home? Strange.)
ahhhh, ya got me! funny though, right?
and you're right on the NY trilogy. i love that opening sentence.
At first I was trying to think if I've ever read a book that used that quote as an opening, but I thought I'd just shoot for what I thought it was.
I have no idea what book the last one is from, but it seems like something I would love.
(Reminds me of Ellroy, but I know it's not.)
5. KNOCKEMSTIFF
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
correct. fuking love that first story.
no. 3 is Franny and Zooey
"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested."
"Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet"
Nicely done.
Only no.1 to go. I await Phil for an answer.
Alright, my turn. This is the "It was" Edition, featuring "What's it."
1. It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago--I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman--when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man.
2. It was love at first sight.
3. It was a nice day.
4. It was a pleasure to burn.
5. 'What's it going to be then, eh?'
EDIT_
I added Matt's remaining one, and it actually fits the theme. Weird.
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
4 is something by Stephen King?
Oh wait, nevermind. It's Fahrenheit 451?
Correct.
"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism." -Carl Sagan
"Am I cruel? Probably. Is she an idiot? Yes." -jane s.
No.1 is Roth's Ghost Writer.
Yep. this was yet another double post. moving right along.
God, i'm such a dunce. it's awful. i just realised The Ghost Writer was the damn one put up. ha.
Isn't it amazing that a lot of the books you didn't want to give a chance to in high school are just landmark books in your life afterward. Like I didn't read it in high school when I was supposed to. I didn't read The Great Gatsby either. Now they are among my favorite books. Same with 1984.