2009 Barnes & Noble Black Hardcover Desk Diary Calendar by Barnes & Noble

From the Publisher

“I sit in a little room, one wall of which is now completely lined with books.”

—Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

The 2009 edition in the popular Barnes & Noble Desk Diary series celebrates Classic First Lines chosen from a diverse selection of classic and modern novels, short fiction, literary nonfiction, and poetry. This handsome, richly illustrated planner provides a convenient weekly agenda format, monthly calendar grids, and a year of fascinating literary lore in a durable, handcrafted binding.

Savor opening lines from dozens of famous works of literature, accompanied by brief descriptive texts about the works and their authors. Also included is a literary quiz, lists of prize-winning novels, a supplement of classic world maps, an essay from the Barnes & Noble Review, and other special features.

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"In the middle of the path of my life I found myself in a dark forest, and the right way was lost."

THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri, 1321. This opening image to the most revered work of Italian literature takes Dante (1265-1321) and his companion, the Roman poet Vergil, into the Holy Week journey to the nine circles of Hell that comprise the first book of the Comedy, Dante’s Inferno. The images that follow, of the levels of depravity from blasphemy to treason and their embodiments such as wrongheaded lovers Paolo and Francesca, illuminate scholastic thinking while creating a visceral world that fires with life nearly 800 years after its creation. Other books of the Comedy include the Purgatorio, which traverses Purgatory, and the Paradiso, which enters Heaven.

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"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,"

THE RAVEN by Edgar Allan Poe, 1845. Just as he succeeds in eluding easy slotting into one category of American literature, Poe succeeds in The Raven by linking seemingly varying emotions and images: the beloved “lost Lenore” and the “thing of evil” raven that quoth “Nevermore.” This poetic union of horror and romance immediately made Poe famous, with interest in him heightened by his Philosophy of Composition, published the next year, in which he explained how he plotted the poem and wrote it in a single sitting. The rest of Poe’s life and writings continued as amix of creativity, passion, and horror.

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"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures of conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice 'without pictures or conversations?' "

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND by Lewis Carroll, 1865. Written for young Alice Littell, daughter of the Dean at Oxford, where Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) taught, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a mass of contrasts. Carroll was not a children’s author but a mathematician whose books included An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Further, Alice did not remain solely with its intended audience. Over the years, Alice and its successors became more popular with adults, who used them to study Freud and Surrealism. Searching for a key to Alice seems pointless, for as Carroll explained, “The why of this book cannot, and need not be put into words.”

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"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

CITY OF GLASS by Paul Auster, 1985. City of Glass begins like a detective story—a mysterious phone call in the middle of the night; a case of mistaken identity as a mystery writer is wrongly taken to be a detective whose help is urgently needed. From then on, the novel veers further and further from conventional mystery into a postmodern, metafictional mode where Auster himself is one of the characters and symbolism is rampant. The first part of The New York Trilogy, City of Glass established Auster as an unusual and compelling voice in fiction.