This weekend I was introduced to the coolest game EVER! It’s called Ex Libris, and basically everyone brings along some books, and you take turns holding up a book and saying a bit about it and who the main characters are (or reading the blurb on the back). Then everyone has to make up a plausible first (or last) line for the book. All the answers are shuffled up with the real first line, and the person reads them out. Everyone has to guess which is the real first line. There were some people there who were really good writers, and all the participants had a fantastic sense of humour. As a result, many of the lines were very convincing (often better than the actual lines from the books!) and the rest were incredibly funny. Some examples can be found in the china shop
If you brought along a book and no one guessed the actual first line, you got 2 points. If someone else brought along a book and you guessed the correct first line, you got 1 point. If other people thought that the line you invented was the correct first line, you got 1 point for each person who voted for it. (At least I think that’s how it went).
I wasn’t very good at the game. I started off ok, but then I slipped way behind. I think I drank too much boozy hot chocolate and got too silly and giggly (which is not like me at all, honest). So then I spent the rest of the time making up lines like this;
“Fanny,” cried Anne, as she grabbed a cup of coffee and bounced tentatively towards Saz’s trembling bud, but she was too late, the sun was already westering towards Avalon, and Timmy the dog was devouring the last of the Christian Alien teachers with Lashings of Gingerbeer (TM) his ears shining and pink with happiness, oblivious to the frantic cries of the Gumbles who were shouting “Mind your backswing,” but Timmy didn’t see the bogey louvre, and the evil conniving fairies (who weren’t pretty and sparkly at all) were too fast and pretty soon Timmy the horse was drifting down the river, closely resembling an ashtray (which, incidentally, he found educational) and the story might have ended there, or maybe it began, in the cold northern darkness, where there was a tree, and some gods… oh, and there was coffee.
OK, maybe they weren’t quite like that.
I might run out of suitable books if we have a second round. I don’t actually have many novels. Plenty of poetry books and non-fiction, but not many novels. And the ones I do own tend to have first or last lines like this;
I wrote that during those enchanted weeks time expanded, curled back on itself, turned inside out like a magician’s hankerchief, and that Rolf Carle – his solemnity shattered to bits and his vanity somewhere in the clouds – was able to exorcise his nightmares and again sing the songs of his boyhood, and that I at last danced the belly dance I had learned in the kitchen of Riad Halabi, and amid laughter and sips of wine told many stories, including some with a happy ending.
I don’t know if this one would work for ex libris – it’s too clever and foreign and it would probably stick out too much. But who knows? The human mind works in weird and wonderful ways…
Posted by Fionnaigh at April 28, 2003 11:09 PM