One Line to Rule Them All: Vote Now in Round 2!
The votes have been tallied, the results are in, and we’re on to round 2 of our 2024 bookish bracket! As always, there were some shockers alongside a series of mild surprises. And per usual Anne of Green Gables somehow knocks out Shakespeare . . . Anyway, here are the new matchups. Vote away.
Matchup #1:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
vs.
“Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York, / And all the clouds that loured upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” from Richard III by William Shakespeare
Matchup #2
“Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.”
from The Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
vs.
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Matchup #3
"Kidnapping children is never a good idea; all the same, sometimes it has to be done." from Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson
vs
“Where's Papa going with that axe?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Matchup #4
“My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog.”
from Because of Winn Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
vs.
“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.”
from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Matchup #5
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
vs.
“I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.”
from Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Matchup #6
“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s secret citadel.”
from The Odyssey, trans. Lattimore
vs.
“In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.”
from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Matchup #7
”Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.”
from The Luck of the Bodkins by P. G. Wodehouse
vs.
“Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.”
from The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor
Matchup #8
When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.”
from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
vs.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
from The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien
Matchup #9
“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.
from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
vs.
“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.”
from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Matchup #10
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”
from The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton
vs.
"'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug." from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Matchup #11
“A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
from The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
vs.
“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.”
from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Matchup #12
“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.”
from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
vs.
“Marley was dead: to begin with.”
from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Matchup #13
“Call me Ishmael.”
from Moby Dick by Herman Melville
vs.
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
from The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley
Matchup #14
“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.”
from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
vs.
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Matchup #15
“Ships at a distance have every man’s hopes aboard.”
from Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
vs.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
from The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Matchup #16
“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him 'WILD THING!' and Max said 'I'LL EAT YOU UP!' so he was sent to bed without eating anything."
from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
vs.
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
I'm always going to vote against those opening lines from the Odyssey. But it's the Lattimore translation I don't like, and that doesn't seem fair to Homer. Still it looks like he crushed The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in spite of me, but a better matchup would have been Homer against himself.
Here's the Fagles translation which I think beats Lattimore easily: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy."
Because of Winn-Dixie against The Divine Comedy 😂 now there’s an entertaining matchup.