My Guinness word record
Monty, 14, can name 129 books by their first line
Once upon a time, a schoolboy decided he wanted to be in the record books. So Monty Lord set about learning the first lines of as many works as he could.
now the 14-year- old has achieved his ambition by identifying 129 books consecutively just from their opening sentence.
He won a place in Guinness World Records by beating the previous record, a mere 30, held by a man in India.
Monty became fascinated by the powers of memory while doing a distance learning course in psychology.
When his father Fabian Lord, a TV producer, challenged him to get into the record books, he accepted and picked on the feat for the most consecutive books identified from their first sentence.
Monty studied the openings of 200 works using visualisation techniques.
He then sat in a classroom at his school, St Joseph’s High in Bolton, and was filmed as Mr Lord read out 130 opening lines.
He would have identified all 130 correctly had his 44-year-old father not made a mistake at the start, saying the title instead of the opening line of the first book.
The list contained many children’s favourites, such as the first Harry Potter, The Gruffalo and The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. But it also ranged from William
Shakespeare’s plays to Ian Fleming’s Bond books, Iain Banks to Franz Kafka – and included controversial works such as Lolita and A clockwork Orange.
‘I had two or three weeks to memorise the first lines,’ Monty said.
‘I would try to find a link with the title, so Harry Potter was quite easy, but I did get stuck on Lord Of The Rings because I thought it might be The Hobbit – but realised I had already said that one.’ eleven days after achieving his feat last month, he received an email from Guinness World Records titled ‘You’re Officially Amazing’, informing him of his success.
‘I was half asleep when my dad burst in and announced I was now a world memory champion,’ Monty said.
‘It didn’t really sink in for a couple of hours. It’s great but I’m just me and probably everyone has a record within them they can break.’
The feat should come as no surprise as Monty is already an author – he released his first book, Freaky School, when he was just seven – and put his memory skills to the test last summer when he recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language of Jesus, at his father’s wedding... a task he said he found harder.