Assuming I’m right, I’ll post one.
Sh1 -
Regards,
Shodan
Lest Darkness Fall by de Camp ?
That’s it!
From Russia with Love, by Ian Fleming?
Now one from me:
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth . . .
Ridley Walker, Russell Hoban.
Bingo.
Regards,
Shodan
Dickens’ Bleak House?
Brain Glutton, Little Nemo and Marley23 are all correct.
How about a few more?
Still not answered:
Wa2: I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeword that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
Wa5: A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.
Wa6: If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.
Wa7: When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city - which was strange becaus it began before I even knew what a city was.
Wa8: The year that <name> was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham?
Yes!
Wa6: If a man walks in dressed like a hick and acting as if he owned the place, he’s a spaceman.
Double Star - Robert Heinlein
Wa8: The year that <name> was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.
The Princess Bride - William Goldman
All the ones I’ve been able to figure out have already been answered, so I’ll just provide a few:
XW1: He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body.
XW2: It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.
XW3: A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over:
“Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en! Sapristi! That’s all right!”
One of mine is still outstanding, but it’s pretty tough. Here are a few more:
C2: We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone.
C3 [Non-fiction]: My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.
–Cliffy
The Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood
TL1: Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars.
TL2: On the first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Huguenots had come to turn it into a second New Rochelle.
TL3: [Character] inherited from his mother every trait, except for a stray inaccessible few, that made him worth while.
TL4: It was a nice day.
TL5: If this typewriter can’t do it, then fuck it, it can’t be done.
TL6: We are at rest five miles behind the front.
The Awakening?
FP7: “The Signorina had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms, with a view close together, instead of which are north rooms, looking into a courtyard, and a long way apart.”
FP8: The snow in the mountains was melting and [character] had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.
TL2–The Three Musketeers?
TL5 is Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins.
FP7 is A Room With A View by E.M. Forster.
C3 is Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt, and
FP8 is The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (one of my favorites)