EXERCISE:

READ THE OPENING PARAGRAPHS BELOW AND WRITE ABOUT:

1. WHICH ONES MAKE YOU WANT TO READ ON

2. WHICH ONES ARE GOOD INTRODUCTIONS AND WHY
3. WHAT TYPE OF NARRATIVE IS ESTABLISHED

WITCHES Roald Dahl

In fairy-tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks, and they ride on broomsticks.
But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES. The most important thing you should
know about REAL WITCHES is this. Listen very carefully. Never forget what is coming next.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES John Kennedy Toole

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full
of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out
on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded
beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with
disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius
J. Reillys supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting
under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs
of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive
enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything
new or expensive only reflected a persons lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast
doubts upon ones soul.

The Stranger Albert Camus

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I dont know. I had a telegram from the home:
Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely. That doesnt mean anything. It
may have been yesterday.

The Bible

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and
void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters.

Moby Dick Herman Melville

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no
money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail
about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen,
and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily
pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and
especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral
principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
peoples hats off then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my
substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his
sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it,
almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings
towards the ocean with me.

A farewell To Arms

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. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry
and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of
the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw
the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze,
falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the
leaves.

A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of
Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present
period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil,
in the superlative degree of comparison only.

David Copperfield - Dickens

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by
anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record
that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It
was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage
women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there
was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky
in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably
attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours
on a Friday night.

I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history
whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the
question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a
baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this
property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to
keep it.
On The Road Jack Kerouac

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness
that I wont bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary
split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began
the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that Id often dreamed of going
West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect
guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing
through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him
came to me through Chad King, whod shown me a few letters from him written in a New
Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively
and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual
things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we
would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way
he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean
was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk
that he had just married a girl called Marylou.

Lolita Vladimir Nabakov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking
a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Graham Greene Brighton Rock

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.
With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell
he didnt belong belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the
holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queens
Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into
fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away
into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing,
flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health
in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

The Picture of Dorian Grey Oscar Wilde

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred
amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac,
or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his
custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-
sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly
able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic
shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front
of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily
immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling
with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to
make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a
distant organ.
The Go-Between Joseph Losey

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. When I came upon the diary, it was
lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept
my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those
days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one,
which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of
sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and
one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I
could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they
quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty
years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets power to
draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of
recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownershipfeelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt
ashamed.

Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury

IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN IT was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see
things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python
spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands
were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and
burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet
numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came
next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening
sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the
old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged
books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls
and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy Douglas Adams

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the
Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million
miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so
amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has - or
rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of
the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned
with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the
small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people
were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were
increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the
first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever
have left the oceans. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been
nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on
her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong
all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it
was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before
she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea
was lost forever. This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some
of its consequences.

War of the Worlds H G Wells

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this
world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's
and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various
concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man
with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over
this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over
matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one
gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or
thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or
improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed
days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet
across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the
beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth
with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in
the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.

Treasure Island R.L Stevenson

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these

gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole
particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the
end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and
that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up
my pen in the year of grace 17 and go back to the time
when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown
old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under
our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came
plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him
in a hand-barrow a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his
tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat,
his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and
the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I
remember him looking round the cover and whistling to
himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-
song that he sang so often afterwards:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been
tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the
door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and
when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum.
This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a
connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him
at the cliffs and up at our signboard.