Okay, writing.
Here’s the game, I put up some opening paras from ten books off my shelf and you tell me if you would read on (and why…or why not)
Kudos if you know the book or author or can guess it, but that’s not the point of the exercise! No googling (as if you would…)
Here’s the first five
Number 1
Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford, the Gateway to Europe. His main supplier was Anthony Shilling, a Waste Management Coordinator at the Frances Fairfax. Shilling was a quiet, Jamaican gentleman (caucasian - his family originally plantation owners) who came to England in the early seventies, settled in Dalston, London, and felly in love with a woman called Mercy, whose own family came from the Dominican Republic.
Mercy was British born. Anthony and Mercy moved to South Kent in 1976, where they settled and raised four daughters, one of whom was a professor of Political Sciences at Leeds University and had written a book called Culture Clashes: Protest Sings and the Yardies (1977-1999).
Number 2
When I was little, my dad used to tell me, “Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” This seemed like a reasonably astute observation to me when I was eight, but it turns out to be incorrect on a few levels. To begin with you cannot possibly pick your friends, or else I never would have ended up with Tiny Cooper.
Number 3
Friday. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or, maybe, the easiest. Because at five o’clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.
Number 4
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day. It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness. It was cold, and it was dark - in the dead of winter the sun didn’t rise until eight - but it was also lovely. The falling snow and the early hour conspired to paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype photograph, all silver and haze.
Number 5
The Golem’s life began in the hold of a steamship. The year was 1899: the ship was the Baltika, crossing from Danzig to New York. The Golem’s master, a man named Otto Rotfeld, had smuggled her aboard in a crate and hidden her among the luggage.
Here’s the game, I put up some opening paras from ten books off my shelf and you tell me if you would read on (and why…or why not)
Kudos if you know the book or author or can guess it, but that’s not the point of the exercise! No googling (as if you would…)
Here’s the first five
Number 1
Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford, the Gateway to Europe. His main supplier was Anthony Shilling, a Waste Management Coordinator at the Frances Fairfax. Shilling was a quiet, Jamaican gentleman (caucasian - his family originally plantation owners) who came to England in the early seventies, settled in Dalston, London, and felly in love with a woman called Mercy, whose own family came from the Dominican Republic.
Mercy was British born. Anthony and Mercy moved to South Kent in 1976, where they settled and raised four daughters, one of whom was a professor of Political Sciences at Leeds University and had written a book called Culture Clashes: Protest Sings and the Yardies (1977-1999).
Number 2
When I was little, my dad used to tell me, “Will, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.” This seemed like a reasonably astute observation to me when I was eight, but it turns out to be incorrect on a few levels. To begin with you cannot possibly pick your friends, or else I never would have ended up with Tiny Cooper.
Number 3
Friday. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe the hardest time to move unobserved through a city. Or, maybe, the easiest. Because at five o’clock on a Friday nobody pays attention to anything. Except the road ahead.
Number 4
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles, Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day. It seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its essential Mondayness, not to mention its Januaryness. It was cold, and it was dark - in the dead of winter the sun didn’t rise until eight - but it was also lovely. The falling snow and the early hour conspired to paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype photograph, all silver and haze.
Number 5
The Golem’s life began in the hold of a steamship. The year was 1899: the ship was the Baltika, crossing from Danzig to New York. The Golem’s master, a man named Otto Rotfeld, had smuggled her aboard in a crate and hidden her among the luggage.
