Here’s a list of opening lines from various novels. The potential titles follow. There will be no prize, except the satisfaction of a job well done. I will suggest that I would score well on a quiz like this, but I’m not taking it, am I?

1. “Who is John Galt?” The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum’s face.
2. “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendor, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, is was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
4. Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods.
5. It was Wang Lung’s marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, who room was opposite to his own across the middle room.

Choose from these titles:

• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
• Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner
• 1984, by George Orwell
• The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck
• Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor
• Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh