Books: The First Sentence

[MartinG]

Is it Ragtime?

Indeed it is.

[valmont]

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

[valmont]

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.

[valmont]

Hint: this is a translation from the original language.

[MartinG]

Ah, so might it be A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu?

[valmont]

Ah, so might it be A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu?

Yes!

[MartinG]

A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.

[Chris L]

A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.

Clue, @MartinG?

[MartinG]

It's a dystopian vision with a title from a stormy swansong...

[Chris L]

Brave New World?

[Chris L]

I checked and I'm correct, so...

umber whunnnn
yerrrnnn umber
fayunnnn

[valmont]

Misery?

[Chris L]

Misery?

Yes!

[valmont]

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. 

[valmont]

That's the first sentence of the prologue.  Here's the first sentence of the narrative proper:

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.