First Lines

Here is an assortment of story beginnings. For the first who guesses (correct or incorrect) the book titles, there will be a special prize (not a hug, as my nephew offered to give me this week for guessing something incredible). The answers will be posted in several days. Knock yourselves out.

Here they are as found on my bookshelf:

1. On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.
2. It's freezing—an extraordinary 0 degrees Fahrenheit—and it's snowing, and in the language that is no longer mine, the snow is qanik—big, almost weightless crystals falling in clumps and covering the ground with a layer of pulverized white frost.
3. As I take up my pen at leisure and in complete retirement—in good health, furthermore, though tired, so tired that I shall only be able to proceed by short stages and with frequent pauses for rest—as I take up my pen, then, to commit my confessions to this patient paper in my own neat and attractive handwriting, I am assailed by a brief misgiving about the educational background I bring to an intellectual enterprise of this kind.
4. Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman just over and just under forty, come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateau.
5. Here is James Henry Trotter when he was about four years old.
6. The year began with lunch.
7. I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.