Aegypt, John Crowley.
"It was a Saturday afternoon on La Salle Street, years and years ago when I was a little kid, and around three o’clock Mrs. Shannon, the heavy Irish woman in her perpetually soup-stained dress, opened her back window and shouted out into the courtyard, “Hey, Cesar, yoo-hoo, I think you’re on television, I swear it’s you!”
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
Was that one of the Sherlock Holmes stories? (What was the title … ?)
(I would like to add that it’s a bit scary that a least four of us know the opening to The Mayor of Casterbridge)
I thought I knew this one and googled it to confirm. I was totally wrong, so I’ll leave it for someone who actually knows. But I’ll add another opening line just for fun.
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.”
The Eye of Argon, Jim Theis.
I’m embarrassed at myself for recognizing that.
“John Dortmunder was a man on whom the sun shone only when he needed darkness…”
Bad News, by Westlake
Five. 
Nope. Right nationality though.
Are we working on memory, or can we research? If we can research, can we do it online, or only by hard copy?
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.”
“A Scandal in Bohemia.”
And a couple more:
“Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice’s Lenten fast in the desert.”
“An easterly is the most disagreeable wind in Lyme Bay – Lyme bay being that largest bite from the underside of England’s outstretched south-western leg – and a person of curiosity could at once have deduced several strong probabilities about the pair who began to walk down the quay at Lyme Regis, the small but ancient eponym of the inbite, one incisively sharp and blustery morning in the late March of 1867.”
It’s the OP’s place to say, really, but I’ve been assuming we were going by memory, with double-checking allowed (I’ve been using hard copy), on the honor system.
Elementary, my dear Porpentine
Everything is starting to sound like a Bulwer-Lytton entry to me …
I almost submitted this one myself! Walter Miller, A Canticle for Liebowitz.
whoa! I didn’t know people were double checking on google or using google at all!! I really like this thread but its not a fun game if people are only posting answers they know are correct. If I had double checked my ideas I would have gotten way more by now! I vote for memory or whats on your bookcases only
ETA: Here’s the first line of my favorite book:
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.
I’m fine with that, but am going to have to get a clarification on what “your bookcases” means. I’ve done my double-checking by what books were on my bookcases … at work.
ohhhhh you make a good point I didn’t consider.
ETA: I don’t make the rules don’t want to step on anyone’s toes here.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.
A new one:
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
I don’t know any of the unsolved ones, but I’ll submit this:
“The music-room in the Governor’s House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major quartet.”
Oh, oh, Jumps up and down and waves hand. Is that Master and Commander?
I love O’Brian!!!