okay, anyone want something to do while I'm gone? So maybe I'm putting off finishing packing until I come up with a magical way to fit everything into my bag... shhh. The idea is I give you the first 20 or so words of one of the books I've pulled off my shelf semi-randomly (avoiding the excessively obscure) snd you come up with the book. Sounds simple, right? And you wouldn't google them, now would you? Traditional research is, of course, acceptible.

1. In the shade of the house, in the sunshine on the river bank by the boats, in the shade of (bonus words: the sallow wood and the fig tree,)
2. All this happened , more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in...
3. One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof,
4. O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention; a kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
5. Back in the late 1970s, when I was fifteen years old, I spent every penny I then had in the bank to fly across the continent in a 747 jet to Brandon, Manitoba
6. In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone - Vanessa gets credit for this one: Dune, Frank Herbert
7. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. "It's not like I'm using," Case heard someone say,
   - and this one, Neuromancer, William Gibson
8. The hottest day of summer so far was drawing to a close and a drowsy silence lay over the large, square houses - Kat knows her Potter! Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, JK Rowling
9. This time there would be no witnesses. This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and the onset of that interminable light drizzle... - Milan recognizes the brilliance that is Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
10. This book is about an important - perhaps the most important - global political development of the late twentieth century: the transition... (yes, okay, that is the preface, so?)