Ten points for each correctly identified title-source! Thirty points wins you a chocolate-stained te
The BBC's How Well Read Are You? quiz doesn't, alas, provide a cheerily pastable "You are Nine well read!" as part of its answers; but it does give a list of its readers' suggestions about what would make a great opening line for a book. Since I've spent a significant proportion of the last two weeks desperately rewriting the first paragraph of my thesis-novel, this seemed like it might be useful. However:

As I mounted the veranda I smelt her flesh. August's perfume smoothed upon the walls, her noises echoing down stairs like tinkling china quivering for a good tea.

Ooh, he smelt her flesh, and from a distance too. She must be all dead and rotting. That sounds like it could be fun. Oh, wait, she's making noises - maybe she's a zombie? Hey, how come my china doesn't quiver for good tea? That would be great, I could make a pot and bring it nearby and watch the china quiver in anticipation, getting all ready and excited, and then I could laugh evilly and pour the tea down the sink. "Quiver! Quiver away, my cuply friends, but you'll never get my good tea!"

She drank the bourbon like it was oxygen, not realising that her lifeline was the man who had poured it for her.

She drank the bourbon like it was oxygen. That would be "not at all", then, would it?

After the gunshot, silence, like a poultice, fell.

Given that "really inept similes" seems to be the unifying theme here, there's obviously some call for them. Maybe that's what I need to be going for. "I could see him from where I was sitting, his tinkling hair as grey as a train, glasses perched on the end of his nose like a baby eagle." "When I looked, the kitchen was empty, but the toaster was turning some bread into toast, and that toast was as brittle as a child's ear clasped to a glimmering seashell that yearned for fire." "Night fell like Rome: slowly, and with elephants."

My search for what makes a decent start to a novel also involved a bookshop, where I was unfortunately too distracted by the bagpipe rock band playing outside to come to any conclusion. I did, however, start to classify the available opening lines into attention-grabs ("All right. He's dead. Go ahead and talk to him."), descriptions of a setting or character ("A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys."), and statements of generalisation ("The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning."). This was useful primarily because it allowed me to spend forty-five minutes taking the verbs, nouns, and adjectives from the attention-grabs, and substituting them for their equivalents in the descriptions and generalisations. "All happy grandmothers exploded alike. All unhappy grandmothers exploded in their own way."

My conclusion, in any case, is that the best possible opening line has already been used by John Aubrey. I reach this conclusion primarily because it gives me an excuse to quote from Brief Lives again:

When Arch-Bishop Abbot's Mother (a poor Cloath-worker's Wife in Gilford) was with Child of him, she did long for a Jack or Pike, and she dreamt that if she should Eat a Jack, her Son in her Belly should be a great Man.