The Bookish Elf Quiz: Guess the Book Title from the first lines.

Test your literary knowledge with our opening lines quiz. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”– Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen classic. And who can forget the “Call Me Ishmael” beginning of Herman Melville’s maritime classic Moby Dick. But can you remember the opening line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions?

Take our quiz and push your literary knowledge to its limit. We have printed the opening sentences from 20 books, see if you can guess the title of each one.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Author, Writer, Physician and creator of Sherlock Holmes Born: 22 May 1859, Edinburgh, Scotland. Died: 7 July 1930, Crowborough, England. Genre: Detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical novels, non-fiction. Notable Work: Stories of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World Childhood and Early Life Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Doyles were a prosperous Irish-Catholic family. Charles Altamont Doyle, Arthur's father, a chronic alcoholic, was a moderately successful artist, who apart from fathering a brilliant son, never accomplished anything of note. Doyle's mother, Mary, was a lively and well-educated woman who loved to read. She particularly delighted in telling her young son outlandish stories. Her great enthusiasm and animation while spinning wild tales sparked the child's imagination. As Doyle would later recall in his biography, " In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid s...

What is unreliable Narrator ?

Unreliable Narrator is a character who tells the reader a story and whose credibility has been seriously compromised. This may be because the point of view of character is insane, lying, deluded or for any other reasons. The phrase “ unreliable narrator ” was first used by the literary critic Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction in the early 1960s. The technique has been around as long as literature itself has been though. In fact, prehistoric humans probably sat around fires knowingly listening to one hunter who always exaggerated his feats. Sometimes the narrator is unreliable by nature. In other words, some narrators are such terrible people that they cannot tell their stories objectively. In general, even people who commit the worst crimes justify their actions to themselves. A classic example is the murderous narrator of the Edgar Allan Poe story “ The Telltale Heart ”. Perhaps one of the most famous is Vladimir Nabokov ’s Humbert Humbert , a middle-aged man with a predilecti...

You will never lose interest in these books with unreliable narrator

Unreliable Narrator When the narrator is unreliable and can’t be trusted, we, the reader have to think for ourselves to figure out the story. We’ll evaluate the situations and characters critically in the book to figure out what’s going on. Sometime we’ll draw our own conclusions and judge the characters as the author didn’t do it for us. There are so many reasons behind narrator’s reliability. Sometimes they are consciously and intentionally lying, sometimes they misunderstood the situations, and perhaps they’re drunk, or amnesiac, or suffer from some other conditions that keep us doubting their version of story. (We’re all unreliable narrators, because our version of any events or occurrence or incidents is just one of many. But that’s not what we are looking here.) Some stories are too ambiguous that they don’t resolve their plots. Readers reach to the final page without the knowledge of what’s actually happening or happened. It’s on readers how they fill the blanks. For few of us t...

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