almost time...

Scones are in the oven baking for our morning treat. My most comfy cozy reading pjs are set out to don in the morning. A draft of my old read-a-thon stat page is ready to be filled in tomorrow. And my reading pool has been weeded down...well, a little bit anyway.

Thank each of you who voted for the lines that intrigued you. Seriously, thank you so very much. I can't even tell you how much fun I have going through your choices. It's so fun seeing how very different, and sometimes how very similar, different people's choices are. I have to admit that a few of the ones that did get chosen surprised the heck out of me. But I am utterly delighted with the (still enormous :P ) pile I have left to choose from tomorrow!!! And sheesh...you guys who can remember a book from its first line, you boggle my mind. I can think of maybe one or two books in all the world that I would be able to identify by its first line alone. Anyway, my very sincerest thanks!!!

And for anyone who was interested in where a particular line came from, here they are again with the book title. The ones in bold are the ones you chose for me. :)

#1. It was past midnight when I got home Halloween night. (Lost Souls by Michael Collins)

#2. Hardly resembling a man anymore, the thing on the bed jerked and thrashed like a nocturnal creature dragged into the light of day. (Germ by Robert Liparulo

#3. Miss Eileen Laracy shuffled up the higher road in search of lilacs to lay atop her white chenille bedspread. (The Town that Forgot How to Breathe by Kenneth J. Harvey)

#4. The old witch saw that she had gone too far. (Stolen by Vivian Vande Velde)

#5. Delores never met a Healer she didn't like until the night they took her away. (Invasive Procedures by Orson Scott Card)

#6. First thing I did was, I stole a body. (Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins)

#7. "By the Month or by the Night" read the sign over the entrance to the trailer park. (13 1/2 by Nevada Barr)

#8. Grandmother won't tolerate occultism, even of the nose-twitching sort made so adorable by Samantha Stevens, so I'm not allowed to watch Bewitched. (Bliss by Lauren Myracle)

#9. The forecourt of the Chinese Theater smelled of rain-wet stone and car-exhaust, but a faint aroma like pears and cumin seemed to cling to his shirt-collar as he stepped around the clustered tourists, who all appeared to be blinking up at the copper towers above the forecourt wall or smiling into cameras as they knelt to press their hands into the puddled hand-prints in the cement paving blocks. (A Soul in a Bottle by Tim Powers)

#10. I slept at the feet of Boot and Sack. (One Foot Wrong by Sofie Laguna)

#11. Something has happened. (Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante)

#12. She'd been taken it was said. (The Stolen Heart by Lauren Kelly aka Joyce Carol Oates)

#13. Our forests are dark places, secretive, yet well-trodden. (In the Memory of the Forest by Charles t. Powers)

#14. Once upon a time, fairy tales were awesome. (A Tale Dark & Grimm by Adam Gidwitz)

#15. The creature drove its body again and again into the glass, unable to understand why the air had suddenly become impossible to move through, desperately searching for some way out. (Triskellion by Will Peterson)

#16. Miss Jean Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday. (Still Life by Louise Penny)

#17. I was going to have to kill a whole lot of people. (The Digital Plague by Jeff Somers

#18. When Dante Cazabon used his shoulder to open the double doors of the kitchen, he was concentrating on the mountain of soup bowls he carried on a tray in front of him. (The Promises of Dr. Sigmundus, Book One: The Hollow People by Brian Keaney)

#19. I spot her as soon as I get off the elevator on the fourth floor. (Origin by Diana Abu-Jabar)

#20. When the Potato Girl was murdered, the killer cut out her heart. (Promise Not to Tell by Jennifer McMahon)

#21. It was a tidy brownstone on Ninth Street near my home, one that I had passed many times without noticing. (A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans)

#22. The lake in my dreams is always frozen. (The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman)

#23. It was the autumn of 1981 and I'd been asked by my paper the Leinster News to do an article on folklore and changing ways in Ireland, a chance I jumped at, availing myself of the opportunity to return home to Slievenageeha, which I hadn't been to visit in years. (Winterwood by Patrick McCabe)

#24. I was born dead. (A Nameless Witch by A. Lee Martinez)

#25. I'm looking at Jacques-Louis David's 1793 oil painting, The Death of Marat, printed in an art book. (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-Ha Kim)

#26. A razor blade gave me freedom from the Dorms. (Shade's Children by Garth Nix)

#27. In January I had a proposal due to my boss, Leon Fields, on a new project. (Come Closer by Sara Gran)

#28. The four men tracked him down before dawn. (Shades of Simon Gray by Joyce McDonald)

#29. In the small breakfast parlour of Oulton, a pretty girl, Miss Alice Maybell, with her furs and wrappers about her, and a journey of forty miles before her--not by rail--to Wyvern, had stood up to hug and kiss her old aunt, and bid her goodbye. (The Wyvern Mystery by Sheridan Le Fanu)

#30. The story that follows is one I never intended to commit to paper. (The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

#31. Thomas dreamed he walked a familiar forest, following a timeworn path of the Tuscaroras. (The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton)

#32. The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning. (Rage by Richard Bachman aka Stephen King)

#33. Jude had a private collection. (Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill)

#34. This was supposed to be a writers' retreat. (Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk)

#35. A Midwestern town. (Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge)

#36. I never bought into our island's superstitions about Indian summers being cursed. (What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-Ucci)

#37. The best remedy for a bruised heart is not, as so many people seem to think, repose upon a manly bosom. (Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers)

#38. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. (The Secret History by Donna Tartt)

#39. It is easy to pinpoint the minute when my friend Branwell began his silence. (Silent to the Bone by E.L. Konigsburg)

#40. Whenever I meet a man, I catch myself wondering what our child would look like if we were to make a baby. (Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino)

#41. The following manuscript comes from a remarkable collection of documents termed "the Mary papers." (Witch Child by Celia Rees)

#42. It was November. (The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield)

#43. My mother used to tell me about the ocean. (The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan

#44. I find Will facedown in the woods near Barton Creek. (The Less-Dead by April Lurie)

#45. It's only half an hour since someone--Robyn I think--said we should write everything down, and it's only twenty-nine minutes since I got chosen, and for those twenty-nine minutes I've had everyone crowded around me gazing at the blank page and yelling ideas and advice. (Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden)

#46. My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly. (Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

#47. I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. (Dark Places by Gillian Flynn)

#48. The story was told to me by my old tutor, Theo Parmitter, as we sat beside the fire in his college rooms one bitterly cold January night. (The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill)

#49. This is what I remembered. (Green Witch by Alice Hoffman)

#50. A whimpering echoed underground. (A Child's Book of True Crime by Chloe Hooper)

#51. If you were gorgeous and running out of money, what would you do? (Syndrome by Blake Leibel)

#52. "Gemma, tell your story again," Shana begged, putting her arms around her grandmother and breathing in that special smell of talcum and lemon that seemed to belong only to her. (Briar Rose by Jane Yolen)

#53. In a quiet, small corner of the dreaming... (House of Mystery: Room & Boredom by Matthew Sturges and Bill Willingham)

#54. Patrick's house was a ghost. (Shine by Lauren Myracle)

#55. "Bloody shambles this last six years." (From Hell by Alan Moore)

#56. After a year of hunting, I finally caught up with Sarah. (Peeps by Scott Westerfeld)

#57. As the bus entered the prefectural capital of Takamatsu, garden suburbs transformed into city streets of multicolored neon, headlights of oncoming cars, and the checkered lights of office buildings. (Battle Royale by Koushun Takami)

#58. 'Doctor Clare Beale, Pharmacology, 5:15PM Sunday.' (The Lords of Misrule by John Tomlinson, Dan Abnett, and Steve White)

#59. No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. (The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson)

#60. It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. (The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson)

#61. It was as black in the closet as old blood. (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley)

#62. When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had traveled across a desert of living sand. (The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier)

#63. "What's for breakfast?" (Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgul)

#64. Greater Chongqing, the United Federation of China. (World War Z by Max Brooks)

#65. Once upon a time--for that is how all stories should begin--there was a boy who lost his mother. (The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly)

#66. I had always thought that a person born blind and given sight later on in life through the miracles of modern medicine would feel reborn. (Eleanor Rigby by Douglass Coupland)

#67. Storm Eden was forbidden to put a foot outside the high walls that surrounded the park at Eden End. (Into the Wood by Lyn Gardner)

#68. Venice, California, in the old days had much to recommend it to people who liked to be sad. (Death Is a Lonely Business by Ray Bradbury)

#69. How lucky were they? (Case Histories by Kate Atkinson)

#70. We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. (Feed by M.T. Anderson)

#71. I found him in the garage on a Saturday afternoon. (Skellig by David Almond)

#72. Pitch blackness had settled much earlier than usual over this, the last afternoon of the year. (The Night of Wishes by Michael Ende)

#73. In the beginning there were thirty-six of them, thirty-six droplets of life so tiny that Eduardo could see them only under a microscope. (The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer)

#74. Teenage girls are powerful creatures. (Pretty Dead by Francesca Lia Block)

#75. When I was really young, if there was one thing I wanted in the world, it was to be invisible. (Tamsin by Peter S. Beagle)

#76. I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. (The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks)

#77. The sheets are dirty. (Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie)

#78. Before she became the Girl from Nowhere--the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who live a thousand years--she was just a little girl in Iowa named Amy. (The Passage by Justin Cronin)

#79. "Hey, Al. Come look at this one." (Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters)

#80. In 1909, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article titled "If Bugs Were the Size of Men." (Wicked Bugs by Amy Stewart)

Again, many thanks. And I can't wait to see many of you tomorrow! Have a fabulous weekend, be ye reading or not!