"Entertainment Weekly" has a great little online feature called "20 Classic Opening Lines in Books," and it got me thinking what it is about first lines of books that really stick with us.
The first lines are the first impression a book really makes on us. Yeah, sure, we look at the cover and we read the blurb on the back, but the first line can really grab a hold of a reader, such as the first line of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury: "It was a pleasure to burn."
Other first lines really set the tone for a book, especially in a book with a very specific tone, such as "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain: ''You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter." Or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson: ''We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.''
And some of them are bigger than themselves, the first step of an epic adventure - the first line of the first "Harry Potter" book, "'Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.'' Or the first line of "The Hobbit," "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." (That line, much to my disappointment, did not make the list.)
EW's list is chock full of "classic" books (too many of which I haven't read, which seems like a bad thing for a book blogger to admit!), and it made me wonder whether great first lines help make books into classics, or if the first lines of classics are remembered because they are connected with such fantastic books.
Not every book has a great opening line, but it's a pleasure when it does. What are some of your favorite first lines from books?
My favorite first line from a book:
ReplyDeleteThe terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years--if it ever did end--began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
From Stephen King's IT
Also good is from Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman:
She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.
"The late twentieth century has witnessed a scientific gold rush of astonishing proportions: the headlong and furious haste to commercialize genetic engineering."
ReplyDelete-Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton