Rather remarkably, there are now over 1500 of us in this little fledgling community. We were a ‘Featured Publication’ last week which has led us to triple in size in the span of just a few days. Not bad for a Substack that is only a month old!
To the newbies, I’d like to extend a warm welcome. Though our primary focus is on books, this newsletter is really about two things: (1) the transformative power of literature, and (2) celebrating the great writers to be found here on Substack.
To give you an idea of schedule, we have a discussion thread every Monday, and every Thursday we feature a different guest writer, each discussing a book that played a pivotal role in their life. I have big plans in the works for some new community features too. My goal is provide more opportunities for the many brilliant writers among us to get their writing in front of a wider audience, but I’ll save that announcement for next week!
So far we’ve featured three excellent guest posts, and if you missed last week’s I can recommend going back and reading “An Ordinary Man” from the excellent
The one that comes immediately to mind for me is none other than....”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
It's a great start, but if I had to pick the novel's strength, it's the ending--which often gets unfairly overlooked because of opening's fame. Those last few pages, as Carton marches and monologues, are among the finest ever written.
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
Cormac McCarthy "Child of God" - “They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.”
100%. It was actually writing about Blood Meridian on my main substack after McCarthy died last month that gave me the idea for this Substack. Would definitely count this as one of my own foundational books
The opening line cold-cocked me the first time I read it, framing a tension between presumed innocence and a premonition of hellacious violence. From it McCarthy simultaneously builds in both directions in the next three paragraphs until the die is cast: "Night of your birth ... God how the stars did fall ... He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man."
Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 24, 2023Liked by M. E. Rothwell
I have so many favourites but this is the one that came to mind today:
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York." - The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
It's brilliant. I first read it at 16 when my English teacher gave me a battered old copy she had in the classroom. I still have that copy and treasure it!
This is my favorite opening line in literature! It does so much. And it echoes with the second half of the novel in profound way. Plus that sound. The tone. It got inside me and, in a way, changed my life. Afterward, I just kept thinking: what else can I read that sounds like THAT?
Haha I am on this one! Books That Made Us has rather exploded and gotten over 1500 subs in a month. Cosmographia has been a slow burn over the last year, but undoubtedly my passion project
Here's the first line, plus a bonus b/c I love both:
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."
And how wonderful is this:
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
"No, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."
~ from "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston
Further props to Banks, because the final word of the final sentence on the last page of his novel "Feersum Endjinn" (where he's writing scifi as Iain M. Banks) solves the mystery that the entire novel revolves around. The final word. Now *that* is controlled writing.
Robert Jorden reached into the pocket of his peasant woolen pants and removed a knife and an onion. He sat on a stone hard and gray. Robert Jordan cut the onion into thin slices and placed them between two slices of the smoky bread made yesterday morning by Pelar. Robert Jordan ate the onion and bread sandwich as he stared into the morning sky. In the far distance he saw the black dots of Fascist aircraft. He felt a hand placed softly on his shoulder.
“How art thee, my little rabbit.” Robert Jordan stroke the hand lovingly and tenderly and manfully.
I don’t know who was better at involving every human sense in their writing - I can feel the woolen pants and cold stone and smell the onion and taste it with the smoky bread. And I can all while see and hear the aircraft and feel the touch of the peasant girl. I just love it. Thx for bringing it back. And for The Old Man and the Sea - it can be even more evocative.
Although I have to say I think the rest of that opening paragraph is a bit over the top in terms of description, but I realise that I'm probably in a minority of one!
Hi Terry, I have a facsimile copy of Orwell's original typescript/manuscript with both his handwritten and typed alterations and the changes from his first draft are quite dramatic.
His original paragraph was,
It was a bright cold blowy day in April, and a million radios were striking thirteen. Winston Smith pushed open the front door of Victory Mansions, turned to the right down a passage way and pressed the button of the lift. Nothing happened. He had just pressed a second time when a door at the end of the passage opened letting out a smell of boiled greens and old rag mats and the aged prole who acted as porter and caretaker thrust out a grey seamed face and stood for a moment sucking his teeth and watching Winston malignantly.
"Lift ain't working" he announced at last ...
It's fascinating to see how Orwell wrote, rewrote and rewrote again (and again) before achieving what he wanted.
I don’t think any first line has ever sold me on a book purchase faster than this one:
“I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.”
It's been a good 25 years since I read it, but it remains a favorite. I should really revisit it one of these days. I adored it along with Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams.
I had trouble getting into the Poisonwood Bible and am not sure off the top of my head if I've tried anything new of hers since that. But those first three are just magical.
That’s actually the only one of hers that I’ve read and loved it. But I was living in Zambia at the time right up next to the border of the Congo so perhaps that’s why. Always been fascinated with that country, if you can even call it that
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Tristam Shandy
When I was a child I read Moby Dick, only to learn later that the version I'd read had been abridged. But in addition to abridging it, they changed the first line to "My name is Ishmael." And I think someone should by put on trial for such an atrocity.
Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 24, 2023Liked by M. E. Rothwell
My love of reading started very young so here's one that really got my attention as a child. E.B. White speaking plainly to his little readers, as always, in Charlotte's Web:
“Where's Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
My favorite E.B. White book, after Charlotte’s Web, was a book he cowrote with Professor William Strunk that is called called The Elements of Style. It’s a great little book I should pay more attention to, and one I gave ESL staff as they struggled to polish their writing skills. Here is a typical nugget of wisdom from the book:
“I remember a day in class when he (Professor Strunk) leaned forward, in his characteristic pose - the pose of a man about to impart a secret and croaked, "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! "This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?”
I also love 'There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories'. (George MacDonald - The Golden Key) ... Something magical and enthralling about it.
My vote is for THE SECRET HISTORY: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation".
So many good candidates, but I would probably go with John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany:
"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 is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
Also, this is the first paragraph, not the first line, but I though it deserved a mention:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
That honor must go to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. In fact, it was while listening to Sir Salman’s Masterclass when he read this sentence out loud that he convinced me to read the book. Here it is:
“I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.”
Oh that is so good. I have a copy of Midnight’s Children but have never read it, I think perhaps because I once heard it was boring. However, I read the Satanic Verses last year after his tragic stabbing and loved it. His writing style is unlike anything I’ve come across - except perhaps in Arunhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which makes one think perhaps there’s something about an Indian writing in English that leads to such wonderful prose.
It does get a bit boring towards the end, but until then it’s a wild, wild ride. And although I haven’t read The God of Small Things, I’ve always thought that stories set in India are pretty awesome. Absolutely loved Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mircea Eliade’s Maitreyi. And there are two books from the recent International Booker Shortlist that have caught my eye lately, Pyre by Perumal Murugan and Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (which actually won the prize in 2022).
Edit: I looked it up, and it seems Pyre didn’t make it to the shortlist, and they weren’t nominated in the same year. Pyre was longlisted for the Int Booker in 2023 and Tomb of Sand won the Int Booker in 2022.
I’m a fan of Rushdie but even more of a V.S. Naipaul fan. Have you read Joseph Anton, by Rushdie? It’s a memoir after his life after the fatwa under the pseudonym Joseph Anton.
I’ve heard about it, but not yet. I also haven’t read anything by V.S. Naipaul. I had my eye on A House for Mr Biswas but I haven’t bought it yet. Thanks for the recommendations! Will check out Joseph Anton.
I think it helps to be a SK fan. He also introduces some major changes in the second book, building a secondary cast which remains throughout the rest of the series. Roland is a bit less interesting on his own.
From Douglas Adam’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
It’s a little humiliating to live in an unfashionable end of the Galaxy, but I like to think we experience less space tourism because of it, and the tourism is properly managed by the Men in Black.
Secret History's hard to top, but I will say that Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier might be the only book to get me committed on its first sentence alone: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." What the hell made it so sad?! And can I even trust this narrator? How high is this person's Sadness Bar, and should I be impressed that this story cleared it?? Truly, the nerve of this writer for thinking he could hook me in with a line like that. But Reader, I had to know.
And all love to the delightful one from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: "Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning."
Reading now. It’s hard to exaggerate how great this book is. Every choice she made, every character, nuance, colloquialism, the way it’s narrated - *chef’s kiss* 💋
“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
A writing teacher once told me that if I hand copied this book, I would become a writer. I now have a handwritten copy of For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s all.
Ever? I don't know. But I started Louise Erdrich's "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" last night and was totally taken by the opening line. "The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind."
"So I'm at the cocktail party, right? And Margaret Atwood is there, and she can't keep her hands off me." - How to Be a Canadian by Will & Ian Ferguson.
The paragraph goes on to read... “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
My vote is definitely for 100 years of Solitude but Love in the Time of Cholera is also brilliant
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.”
Yes, you can go on - the Autumn of the Patriarch, News of a Killing, all brilliant.
And how about the Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head....
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting....
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.
“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."
You're immediately thrust into the presence of a monstrous intelligence. Not unlike the best of the Hannibal Lector scenes in the movie Silence of the Lambs.
Jul 27, 2023·edited Jul 27, 2023Liked by M. E. Rothwell
Thanks for sending. I enjoyed the essay. I'm due for a re-read of Lolita and I'll be curious to see if I continue to be distracted from the monstrosity by the gorgeous prose.
Also, in terms of a submission I ended up writing and sending a post on Revolutionary Road.
I was unsure of your timing until now, and once I had an idea, I needed (irresistible-urge-needed) to write it and send it out. So, I will make another submission entry on a different book.
I was rather taken with “In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.”
I will be the obvious nerd and put forth the delightful: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
👑
Yep. This wins.
The one that comes immediately to mind for me is none other than....”It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Legendary!!!!
Big up Jane
I knew it would be top of mind for many - well done!
An absolute classic.
This is the one I came here to say too. :) Great minds and all.
So good!
IMO, nobody will ever top Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Oooo this is new to me but I love it
to me it's perfect because it opens up so many questions just from that one line
And the cadence of the line is so hypnotic. You can say it over and over in rhythm, and it never grows less mysterious.
I agree, Elinor
A Tale of Two Cities. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"
I knew this would be suggested and deservedly so
that's the one I was gonna suggest! It was bound to come up
It's a great start, but if I had to pick the novel's strength, it's the ending--which often gets unfairly overlooked because of opening's fame. Those last few pages, as Carton marches and monologues, are among the finest ever written.
Sydney Carton is such an underrated character!
He's one of the original anti-heroes!
Best starting ever.
Opening line from Tale of Two Cities for me as well.
I’m also a sucker for French existentialists writing about Africa. Camus, The Stranger:
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”
Yes love this one
Great reminder. This is one that knocked me over from go.
First lines ++ of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison :
"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
God that hits right in the heart from the get go
Have to read this one
Cormac McCarthy "Child of God" - “They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.”
Another McCarthy great is the literal command into the world of Blood Meridian “SEE the child.”
There are few works of literature with more memorable passages than 'Blood Meridian'.
100%. It was actually writing about Blood Meridian on my main substack after McCarthy died last month that gave me the idea for this Substack. Would definitely count this as one of my own foundational books
One of the best. I just re-read it again to write about him for (what would have been) his 90th birthday on the 20th. He was singular.
Yes absolutely!
The opening line cold-cocked me the first time I read it, framing a tension between presumed innocence and a premonition of hellacious violence. From it McCarthy simultaneously builds in both directions in the next three paragraphs until the die is cast: "Night of your birth ... God how the stars did fall ... He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man."
https://www.cormacmccarthy.com/works/blood-meridian/
I have so many favourites but this is the one that came to mind today:
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York." - The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
ooo that’s good. Another book I’ve never got round to reading
It's brilliant. I first read it at 16 when my English teacher gave me a battered old copy she had in the classroom. I still have that copy and treasure it!
This is my favorite opening line in literature! It does so much. And it echoes with the second half of the novel in profound way. Plus that sound. The tone. It got inside me and, in a way, changed my life. Afterward, I just kept thinking: what else can I read that sounds like THAT?
I often think more writers should spend time reading their own work aloud to make it more lyrical, more verse-like
Hear, hear. My heart is with the stylists all the way.
I subscribed to your stack to help you get to your goal -- although it looks like you’re already there. Congrats!
Haha I am on this one! Books That Made Us has rather exploded and gotten over 1500 subs in a month. Cosmographia has been a slow burn over the last year, but undoubtedly my passion project
Here's the first line, plus a bonus b/c I love both:
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."
And how wonderful is this:
"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
"No, women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly."
~ from "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston
That is excellent. I don’t know this book but now I want to
It’s a wonder.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. Amazing book. I believe a Pulitzer Prize winner.
One of the best books 💫
Facts.
Ha! I just said the same one before I saw you’d shared it! It struck me hard the first time I read it and I was like, wow.
Another book where the language is the thing.
"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
-The Crow Road, by Iain Banks.
Talk about readbait! Why did she explode?! I have to know!
*SPOILERS SPOLIERS SPOILERS*
...
...
She's being cremated, and they forget to take her pacemaker out.
Probably an easy thing to forget. I’m now thinking of getting a tattoo on my chest: Upon death, remove pacemaker herein.
Even though I don’t have a pacemaker, it’ll help remind them of proper procedures.
Further props to Banks, because the final word of the final sentence on the last page of his novel "Feersum Endjinn" (where he's writing scifi as Iain M. Banks) solves the mystery that the entire novel revolves around. The final word. Now *that* is controlled writing.
Holy smokes
I absolutely loved The Crow Road and Iain Banks. Thank you SO much for throwing me back to the 90s and making me laugh!
Yaaay. 🙂 Did you see the TV series of it?
I did. There was a period in the 90s when I was consuming all things Iain Banks, but not Iain M Banks. Did you watch it?
Oh, Iain Banks...
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
Is this The Old Man and the Sea?
Yes.
Feeling pretty happy with myself after that guess 😏. Then again Hemingway’s style is pretty clearly his so perhaps I shouldn’t be!
Robert Jorden reached into the pocket of his peasant woolen pants and removed a knife and an onion. He sat on a stone hard and gray. Robert Jordan cut the onion into thin slices and placed them between two slices of the smoky bread made yesterday morning by Pelar. Robert Jordan ate the onion and bread sandwich as he stared into the morning sky. In the far distance he saw the black dots of Fascist aircraft. He felt a hand placed softly on his shoulder.
“How art thee, my little rabbit.” Robert Jordan stroke the hand lovingly and tenderly and manfully.
Or some like that.
I don’t know who was better at involving every human sense in their writing - I can feel the woolen pants and cold stone and smell the onion and taste it with the smoky bread. And I can all while see and hear the aircraft and feel the touch of the peasant girl. I just love it. Thx for bringing it back. And for The Old Man and the Sea - it can be even more evocative.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
You'll know the book - I think it has a great closing paragraph too...
Everything in between is pretty good too now that you mention it!
Although I have to say I think the rest of that opening paragraph is a bit over the top in terms of description, but I realise that I'm probably in a minority of one!
Hi Terry, I have a facsimile copy of Orwell's original typescript/manuscript with both his handwritten and typed alterations and the changes from his first draft are quite dramatic.
His original paragraph was,
It was a bright cold blowy day in April, and a million radios were striking thirteen. Winston Smith pushed open the front door of Victory Mansions, turned to the right down a passage way and pressed the button of the lift. Nothing happened. He had just pressed a second time when a door at the end of the passage opened letting out a smell of boiled greens and old rag mats and the aged prole who acted as porter and caretaker thrust out a grey seamed face and stood for a moment sucking his teeth and watching Winston malignantly.
"Lift ain't working" he announced at last ...
It's fascinating to see how Orwell wrote, rewrote and rewrote again (and again) before achieving what he wanted.
Thanks, Harry, that's really interesting.
I don’t think any first line has ever sold me on a book purchase faster than this one:
“I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.”
Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
Love that one, too! And the rest of the book.
It's been a good 25 years since I read it, but it remains a favorite. I should really revisit it one of these days. I adored it along with Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams.
I reread The Bean Trees a few years ago and it held up as I hoped it would. I have a whole shelf of Kingsolvers that could use rereading.
I had trouble getting into the Poisonwood Bible and am not sure off the top of my head if I've tried anything new of hers since that. But those first three are just magical.
That’s actually the only one of hers that I’ve read and loved it. But I was living in Zambia at the time right up next to the border of the Congo so perhaps that’s why. Always been fascinated with that country, if you can even call it that
For sheer volume:
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Tristam Shandy
Bloody hells that’s good! What book is that?
Tristram Shandy
“Call me Ishmael.”
When I was a child I read Moby Dick, only to learn later that the version I'd read had been abridged. But in addition to abridging it, they changed the first line to "My name is Ishmael." And I think someone should by put on trial for such an atrocity.
Agree. Burn all Abridgers, all Amenders, all would-be Book Burners.
Flay them and salt them first.
Is that too harsh?
🤣
I will die on my anti-book abridgement hill.
Maybe we can get an angry mob going
Oh! I've always wanted to wield a pitchfork!
Moby Dick is fantastic!
I mean that’s such a great book. No comparison!
I haven't even read this book, but when I opened David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and saw,
Chapter One: I Am Born
"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."
I knew I needed to buy it.
Dickens never misses with his openings!
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing.”
(A River Runs Through It)
My love of reading started very young so here's one that really got my attention as a child. E.B. White speaking plainly to his little readers, as always, in Charlotte's Web:
“Where's Papa going with that axe?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”
Oh that’s great. First book I ever cried reading
Oh me too. Wonderfully heartbreaking.
My favorite E.B. White book, after Charlotte’s Web, was a book he cowrote with Professor William Strunk that is called called The Elements of Style. It’s a great little book I should pay more attention to, and one I gave ESL staff as they struggled to polish their writing skills. Here is a typical nugget of wisdom from the book:
“I remember a day in class when he (Professor Strunk) leaned forward, in his characteristic pose - the pose of a man about to impart a secret and croaked, "If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! "This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? Why run and hide?”
Hahaha. Yes! A witty classic.
'Marley was dead, to begin with.'
- Charles Dickens ('A Christmas Carol')
I also love 'There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories'. (George MacDonald - The Golden Key) ... Something magical and enthralling about it.
Oh! Another came to mind ... 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' (Tolstoy - Anna Karenina)
Love how Dickens openings are in this thread. He really knew how to open a book!
the best opening line? "once upon a time"
at some stage in our lives, each and every one of us was fascinated with that line
You know I had never thought of that but you are so right
How many new readers have those words hooked? Great point!
My vote is for THE SECRET HISTORY: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation".
This reminds me of the “Last Words from Montmartre”, “for dead little Bunny and Myself, soon dead.”
Yessss!!! The Secret History is my go-to “for anyone and everyone” recommendation :)
Such a classic, and stands up to the test of time even 30 years later!
So many good candidates, but I would probably go with John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany:
"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 is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."
Wow I don’t know that one but I’m all in
A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of the finest books I’ve read. This reminds me I should read it again.
It is very, very worth your time.
Added to the list
Also, this is the first paragraph, not the first line, but I though it deserved a mention:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
That honor must go to Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. In fact, it was while listening to Sir Salman’s Masterclass when he read this sentence out loud that he convinced me to read the book. Here it is:
“I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.”
Oh that is so good. I have a copy of Midnight’s Children but have never read it, I think perhaps because I once heard it was boring. However, I read the Satanic Verses last year after his tragic stabbing and loved it. His writing style is unlike anything I’ve come across - except perhaps in Arunhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which makes one think perhaps there’s something about an Indian writing in English that leads to such wonderful prose.
It does get a bit boring towards the end, but until then it’s a wild, wild ride. And although I haven’t read The God of Small Things, I’ve always thought that stories set in India are pretty awesome. Absolutely loved Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Mircea Eliade’s Maitreyi. And there are two books from the recent International Booker Shortlist that have caught my eye lately, Pyre by Perumal Murugan and Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (which actually won the prize in 2022).
Edit: I looked it up, and it seems Pyre didn’t make it to the shortlist, and they weren’t nominated in the same year. Pyre was longlisted for the Int Booker in 2023 and Tomb of Sand won the Int Booker in 2022.
I’m a fan of Rushdie but even more of a V.S. Naipaul fan. Have you read Joseph Anton, by Rushdie? It’s a memoir after his life after the fatwa under the pseudonym Joseph Anton.
I’ve heard about it, but not yet. I also haven’t read anything by V.S. Naipaul. I had my eye on A House for Mr Biswas but I haven’t bought it yet. Thanks for the recommendations! Will check out Joseph Anton.
Such a fantastic book.
This was one of the first ones that came into my head as well. Wonderful.
“It was a pleasure to burn.” Fahrenheit 451.
Read that for the first time last year and have to say it completely lived up to the hype
One of the first books that struck me to the core. Such a great read.
“They shoot the white girl first.”
Abdulrazak Gurnah “Paradise”. (I’m a sucker for African stories.)
Ok, I need to read this!
https://a.co/d/6WU4xMn
I’m hooked on this one
"Say a man catches a bullet through his skull in somebody's war, so where's the beginning of that?" The English Passengers
Disorienting and yet so inviting
Absolutely!
I loved this book.
Me too!
“This is the story of what a Woman’s patience can endure, and what a Man’s resolution can achieve.” -Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Epic
Oooo! Now I want a challenge along the lines of “best opening that within six sentences gives the definitive comparison of women and men.”
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Thrash me and call me uncultured but I never could get into The Dark Tower series. Is it because I haven’t read enough Stephen King to appreciate it?
I think it helps to be a SK fan. He also introduces some major changes in the second book, building a secondary cast which remains throughout the rest of the series. Roland is a bit less interesting on his own.
From Douglas Adam’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
It’s a little humiliating to live in an unfashionable end of the Galaxy, but I like to think we experience less space tourism because of it, and the tourism is properly managed by the Men in Black.
Another absolute great. Loved the Men in Black reference 😂
Secret History's hard to top, but I will say that Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier might be the only book to get me committed on its first sentence alone: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." What the hell made it so sad?! And can I even trust this narrator? How high is this person's Sadness Bar, and should I be impressed that this story cleared it?? Truly, the nerve of this writer for thinking he could hook me in with a line like that. But Reader, I had to know.
And all love to the delightful one from George Eliot's Daniel Deronda: "Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning."
That George Eliot line has so many layers because of the fact the pen name itself is make believe
„First, I got myself born.“
Barbara Kingsolver „Demon Cooperhead“.
Is that the one that just came out? I loved Poisonwood Bible
Yes! And it’s so, so good! 💯❤️🔥
Reading now. It’s hard to exaggerate how great this book is. Every choice she made, every character, nuance, colloquialism, the way it’s narrated - *chef’s kiss* 💋
Absolutely! Couldn’t agree more!!! 💯
And finally:
“He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees.” Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
A writing teacher once told me that if I hand copied this book, I would become a writer. I now have a handwritten copy of For Whom The Bell Tolls. That’s all.
Ever? I don't know. But I started Louise Erdrich's "The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse" last night and was totally taken by the opening line. "The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind."
The poetics of the line are impressive.
Erdrich is impressive. Always. And, for some reason, she always surprises me.
So atmospheric
"So I'm at the cocktail party, right? And Margaret Atwood is there, and she can't keep her hands off me." - How to Be a Canadian by Will & Ian Ferguson.
“Life is difficult.”
M. Scott Peck - The Road Less Traveled
The paragraph goes on to read... “This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”
Man that’s good
We were somewhere near Barstow, in the middle of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold
Amazed no one had said this one! Was sure it would be one of the most popular. Epic opening that really sets the tone for the whole book
Hunter Thompson?
My vote is definitely for 100 years of Solitude but Love in the Time of Cholera is also brilliant
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.”
His prose is just so unlike anything else I’ve ever read
Yes, you can go on - the Autumn of the Patriarch, News of a Killing, all brilliant.
And how about the Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.
Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close to him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald's head. The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.
Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history and, of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald's head....
It is 1971, and Mirek says: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting....
I love the simplicity, intimacy and intrigue of Forster’s Howards End: ‘One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister.’
That’s very nice
Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God:
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men.
Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”
Someone else mentioned this, and can see why it’s a popular choice. I’m not familiar with this book but I’m so in after this first line
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
James Joyce makes me wild every time. But then I am a poet.
He does things that shouldn’t be possible with words!
I know! When ever I read Joyce I have to go write poetry afterwards!
One of my favourites.
“And there goes another morning of my life, winging off into eternity.”
Me, not published yet.
I like it a lot
Jeanette Winterson's "Written On The Body": "Why is the measure of love loss?"
So many years later and this line still gives me goosebumps.
“It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed ...” Fahrenheit 451
I just went through dozens of books on my bookshelf looking for a great first line. This one stood above the rest.
So good! Read this one for the first time last year and didn’t disappoint
First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages. A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark presses hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.
- The Overstory, by Richard Powers
I just want to say this was wildly enjoyable reading 😇
It really was, wasn’t it!
That would be The Night Circus, of course. “The circus arrives without warning.”
Best Opening:
“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."
You're immediately thrust into the presence of a monstrous intelligence. Not unlike the best of the Hannibal Lector scenes in the movie Silence of the Lambs.
If you haven’t seen it already, our first ever guest post was on Lolita!
https://booksthatmadeus.substack.com/p/whose-behavior-have-you-excused
Thanks for sending. I enjoyed the essay. I'm due for a re-read of Lolita and I'll be curious to see if I continue to be distracted from the monstrosity by the gorgeous prose.
Also, in terms of a submission I ended up writing and sending a post on Revolutionary Road.
I was unsure of your timing until now, and once I had an idea, I needed (irresistible-urge-needed) to write it and send it out. So, I will make another submission entry on a different book.
Best,
David
No problem at all, David!
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains
I was rather taken with “In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who was one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages.”
Sorry, I forgot to say this is Patrick Süsskind's Perfume.