The New Monday Quiz Classic

It's

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While we're all studying up on the events of the 1020s, I invite you to enjoy this New Monday Quiz Classic^tm that first appeared in November 2007.

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This Thursday Monday Quiz is a "Is It or Isn't It" game. From the list of twelve items, your job is to determine whether each IS or ISN'T a true example of the week's category:

Famous First Lines

The following are the opening lines of well-known novels. But, have I listed them with the correct novel?

1. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

I have just returned from a visit to my landlord--the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.

2. Umberto Eco, Name of the Rose

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

4. Alex Haley, Roots

The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight.

5.Joseph Heller, Catch-22

You are about to begin reading Joseph Heller's new novel, Catch-22.

6. Franz Kafka, The Trial

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

7. Jack London, Call of the Wild

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

8. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

9. George Orwell, 1984

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

10. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Swann's Way)

In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.

11. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

12. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Submit your answers in the form of a comment. Then, have a fabulous Thursday.  Er, Monday.

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Last week's answers:

1. The Tale of Genji was written in Japan.
2. The English church, then as now, is headquartered in Cantebury.
3. Basil II, with his legendary pro-blindness campaign, was the Byzantine emperor.
4. Brian Boru was king of Ireland.
5. The Dome of the Rock suffered earthquake damage in 1016.
6. The capital of the Eastern Slavs was Kiev, hence "Kievan Rus'."
7. The formidable Rajendra Chola conquered Sri Lanka.
8. The Dresden Codex, coming from Chichen Itza, is Mayan; Yucatan was the heartland of the Mayan Empire.
9. Mahmud of the Ghaznavids -- a basically Persian empire -- brought Islam with him on his many campaigns of conquest to the southeast. He's generally seen as a religious hero in Muslim Pakistan, and also Afghanistan; he's generally seen as a seriously bad dude in Hindu India.
10. The Kalbids didn't last all that long, and it wasn't the largest of empires, but it was probably a decent life for a proto-aristocrat in sunny Sicily.

A large fiefdom goes to Christine M. for amassing a powerful eight points despite only having nine questions to work with; gs49 equaled her score and is thus granted the vaguely defined neighboring region.