Before we get to this week’s You Tell Me, I have a request, nay, a plea. Please please please don’t forget about the blog archives — they are down on the right side of the page, just itching to be clicked on. The older posts get lonely and they need friends, and then they start getting depressed and they turn to the drinking, and pretty soon I have a bunch of drunken old blog posts blathering about how people have forgotten all about them and confuse them with old Miss Snark posts and that gets them to fighting and I really don’t need a riot on my hands. (Those of you wondering about how to query trilogies and series, please visit this post from July). Thanks for your understanding. They’re crazy, I know.
So for this week’s You Tell Me, I’ve been wondering: What is your favorite first line in a novel? And why did it hook you?
I’d have to go with the old standby: “Call me Ishmael.” So simple, so awesome. Also because MOBY DICK happens to be my favorite novel.
What’s yours?
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Favorite first line is, “He carried his girl tied to his front, the trapsack on his back, the rifle balanced like a yoke along his shoulders.” — A Sudden Country
Favorite names? Ishmael, Fenno, & Parsifal. You already know one of the novels. Can you remember the others?
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice–not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he s the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
It hooked me because it was haunting and compelling and the first person drew me in.
“All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights, waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears.”
– – – Mickey Spillane, ‘Kiss Me Deadly’
The story isn’t literary fiction by any means, but it’s tighly written and moves in a brisk fashion.
Spillane really set a scene with that line. It stays with you through the entire story, informing perceptions as you read.
It’s what a hook should be.
Well, favorite is hard for me to pick, but certainly in the my top 10, “Going Postal”, by Terry Pratchett:
“They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged.”
And have to agree with you on Moby Dick. Well, not the part in the motel… boarding house, but out on the sea, with all the whaling and such. So rich, so full of blood and death.
“We were somewhere near Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
It gives an immediate sense of place, of vernacular, and most importantly a need to know both “What’s happening?” and “What’s going to happen next?”
“They murdered him.”
–Robert Cormier, THE CHOCOLATE WAR
Great because, when you’re in high school and you’re being forced to read this, a “murder” is a wonderful place to start. But then, when you finish the book and love it and revisit it from time to time, you understand not only how powerful it is but also how prophetic.
Runner up: “When Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of unsettling dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous vermin.”
Because when you’re in high school and you’re forced to read this and it starts with somebody turning into a bug….
“My wound is geography.” Pat Conroy, in Prince of Tides.
I’m not normally a mainstream fiction kind of guy, but that line hooked me. When I worked in a bookstore, there was one man in a wheelchair who came in regularly and sang the praises of that book with almost religious fervor. I shouldn’t say almost, he did remind me of door to door missionaries. A couple of years later I tried the book. He was right. This coming from someone who much prefers SF or Fantasy to mainstream fiction.
From The Gunslinger (Book 1 of The Dark Tower) by S. King, “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
It has suspense, raises questions that makes you read on, and most importantly sets the tone of the story perfectly, IMO.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
from Jane Eyre.
I guess I love it because of its immediate closeness and…hmmm…assumed trust? We fall right into the lap of her life and perceptions, I guess.
But it’s hard to say what makes it so magical — which probably has something to do with why it is.
I visit your old blog posts regularly, wiping the droll off their chins and covering their bits back up with a blanket – LOL
One of my favorite first lines (I have many, including one of my own, “The naked man ran screaming down the hallway.”) is from Tom Robbins’ “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” = “The day the stock market falls out of bed and breaks its back is the worst day of your life.”
Cheers to my future agent.
Two come to mind:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta:the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Not only does it draw me in, it makes me want to languish on the word “Lolita” as he does.
My other favorite is from The Bell Jar:
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
It sets the scene, the tone and the narrator’s frame of mind in just a few words.
“It was a dark and stormy night.” –A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle.
This was my all-time favorite book in elementary school. I always thought that Snoopy (in Peanuts) was quoting L’Engle. In high school, I finally learned about Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous run-ons. And suddenly years of comics made much more sense.
“He’s a Mad Scientist and I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”
The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein.
Who describes themselves like that? One line of dialogue and a clever referral to one of the oldest cliches in pulp history.
Who is this woman? Who is her ‘Mad Scientist’ father? And WHO is she telling this to?
I had to know more…
I’ve got tons of ’em, but hre are two:
“What was the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
“I won’t tell you that. But I’ll yell you the worst thing that ever happened to me . . . the most dreadful thing.”
“Ghost Story” by Peter Straub (for which I just posted a review in my blog “A Curious Man.”
No. 2: “When the fresh-faced guy in the Chevy offered him a ride, Parker told him to go to hell.”– “The Hunter” by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake)
and one more . . . .
“A screaming comes across the sky.”– “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon
good call lawrence on the fear and loathing line. i like the openers that make you go ‘what the heck am in for?’ so the opener for Finnegans Wake and Tarantula definitely fit that bill.
best opener though in terms of setting up a character is ‘the catcher in the rye’: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
“I did two things on my 75th birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.” -John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.
And my second favorite: “Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.” -John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream.
Where first lines are concerned, John Scalzi reigns king amongst modern SF writers.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds
Maybe because I’m reading to children right now, here are a few YA entries:
The classic – “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” from Charlotte’s Web. Talk about getting the reader’s attention.
“On the morning of the best day of her life, Maud Flynn was locked in the outhouse, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” You just love that girl from the get-go. That’s from A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz.
I love lists like this. I always get plenty of new book ideas to add to the pile.
Am I exposing my ignorance when I say that “Call Me Ishmael” never struck me as an awe-inspiringly wonderful opening?
“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” — “The Princess Bride” (prologue)
I love the contrasting sentiments of this statement. How can you claim a book as your favorite if you’ve never read it? (Ah, we learn that *reading* and *experiencing* are two different things). I read on to learn more.
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful …” — “Gone With the Wind”
She may not be beautiful, but try telling that to all of the men whom she ensnares. She overcomes poverty, war, death and more — what is there to overcoming a little lack of beauty?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
–Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Brilliant first line. Sets up the story, the voice, the tone, and the time period.
dwight, not only is that first line from Wells a great one, it’s also far longer than the first lines in modern novels. And it’s one sentence!
Admittedly, modern writers tend not to use semicolons, which makes a difference.
It will be interesting to see if first-person narratives score higher than third-person. I think the first person is more immediately seductive. It’s like someone putting an arm around you and saying, “Listen…” And of course you usually do.
My favourite is this: Not long ago, there lived in London a young married couple of Dalmatian dogs named Pongo and Misses Pongo.
It’s from Dodie Smith’s One Hundred and One Dalmations, the first book I ever owned, the first book I bought with my own money. I was only 34. I lie, I was 9. I can think of more dazzling opening lines of course, but first love is first love, regardless of what comes later.
By the way, am I the only one here who has tried to call in sick at work with Moby Dick?
I too love the first lines of A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Catcher in the Rye! But I also love the one from Ellen Foster:
“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this way or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy.” (Okay, it’s the first two lines.)
Three of my favorites!
It started in mud, as many things do.
Tad Williams
Ooh, my favorite first line. Actually mines a favorite first two lines, or favorite paragraph if you will. It’s from the Dick Francis novel, To The Hilt.
“I don’t think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn’t really his fault.”
It’s a terrific opening. His stepfather’s dead. Why? How? Who? The narrator was almost killed. Why? How? Who? I had to read this book. I had to have the answers.
Of course, it was Dick Francis, so I’d have read it even if the opening sucked, but his seldom did. Great first lines are kind of his hallmark.
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”
The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton
You know that he daydreams about being somebody else, but at the same time, the life in which he is immersed is always at the back of his mind.
How do you guys remember these things? It’s terrible, you ask me what my favorite books are or top 10 films, I sort of shrug helplessly. I can’t remember lists at all. Needless to say, first lines don’t stick either.
Songs & lyrics, on the other hand…the Spiderman theme song…
Annalee, you have convinced me to move John Scalzi from the bottom of my TBR pile to the top. Those opening lines sound great.
> How do you guys remember these
Shhh, we don’t. Google does. Google is like smoking in High School. It makes you look good in front of girls!
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
This line is so evocative and practically forces one to read on. Also, it plays with time and gives a hint of the magical realism of the book, so it works with the book as a whole.
War of the Worlds by H.G. Welles
“It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.”
Anthony Burgess-Earthly Powers
I cannot honestly say that the book itself lived up to the promise of that first line.
I was going for the Charlotte’s Web opener so I’ll have to go with my second: “There is no lake at Camp Green Lake.” – Holes by Louis Sachar.
Someone scooped me on Jane Austen’s delectable first line, so I thought I’d add luster to her greatness by posting the first line of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, which is often considered the first real English novel to show how far she had come.
“I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this Royal Slave, to entertain my reader with adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet’s pleasure; nor in relating the truth, design to adorn it with any accidents but such as arrived in earnest to him: and it shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues; there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention.”
At least it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
I was going to post Pride & Predjudice’s, but Gina beat me to it. It’s just so tongue in cheek, and a perfect indicator of what’s to come!
Another favorite? Well… I went to look, and it’s actually three sentences, not one. But just in case you all can tolerate my bending of the rules, here they are:
Harold needed an adventure…
Now, if he had been a man of five-and-twenty, well-armored, well-horsed, and well-trained in the arts of war, he might have commanded the adventure himself. Unfortunately, he was just an eight-year-old boy who found himself quite generally being swept out from underfoot by those more suited to the doing of mighty deeds than he.
– from Lynn Kurland’s “The Tale of Two Swords”, found in the To Weave A Web Of Magic anthology.
It’s so hard to choose. Original Bran Fan picked the one I was going to say. That’s a great opening.
This one says a lot to me too, though:
“The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world.”
And another hard-to-beat first line:
“The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”
OK, I confess. I knowingly cheated and broke the rules by not taking my favorite first lines from novels. But still.
As a well-meaning preschool teacher once said about one of my kids, “She thinks rules are for other people.”
One more, this time actually from a novel, and then it’s back to work.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”
“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
I like this first sentence, because even if you didn’t read the book, you still know enough about it to know that it really goes down the hill from there.
I was just culling the archives earlier meself.
My favorite first line is “Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which I really need to attempt reading again. It’s stated so squarely you can’t help believe it, and it makes me wonder what sort of unhappy family we’re going to read about.
And of course I manage to mangle a simple copy/paste job. Y’all know that should read “happy families are ALL alike….” but for my own peace of mind, I’ll correct it.
“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.” –David Copperfield
Because Charles Dickens is God’s gift to literature.
“There is a similarity, if I may be permitted an excursion into tenuous metaphor, between the feel of a chilly breeze and the feel of a knife’s blade, as either is laid across the back of the neck.”–Jhereg, by Steven Brust.
Runner-up is a Harry Dresden opener: “The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.”
Ooo, niteowl! I read that (“Going Postal”) just last week, and also liked the opening. And Claud, “Jane Eyre” likewise riveted me from the start.
But my favorite that comes to mind and flows off my tongue so easily comes from Kathy Tyers, one of the few Christian sci-fi writers in her newer version of “Firebird”:
“Lady Firebird Angelo was trespassing.”
It sets up so much, and ultimately opens the book with the danger of death that tracks Firebird for much of her life.
Oh, I love the opening to Lolita but someone’s already nabbed that.
I read a lot of children’s books and these two openings are superb. With both you know you are in the hands of a storyteller who’s going to take you somewhere fabulous and new:
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.
“Lyra and her daemon…” Nothern Lights by Phillip Pullman.
My favorite first line (meaning that I’m envious of it and have spent time telling myself that I may not steal it) is
“Jesus would not say fag, she knew that much.” from In the River Sweet by Patricia Henley.
Right away, you have information about the plot and especially about the personality of the character.
“My mother was the town whore, and I loved her very much.” Pigs Don’t Fly Mary Brown
errr…
Replace “town” with “village”. Oops.
“The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced East.”
The Westing Game.
I loved plays on words when I was a kid, and this hooked me right off the bat.