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First Lines

by Kris

I love opening lines. I love bending back the cover of a new book and turning to the first page, reading the very first thing the author thought I should read when she wrote that book. And I always pause after reading that first sentence. Does it instantly leave me wanting more, does it tease me with mystery and wonder, does it keep me reading?

Some opening lines are short, effective and memorable. “Call me Ishmael” is the classic opening line of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. “All this happened, more or less“ is the first thing you read in Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. “It was a pleasure to burn,” writes Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. And Ayn Rand begins Atlas Shrugged with a question, “Who is John Galt?”

Some opening lines are longer but just as memorable. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” begins A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, but then continues with, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…” for the remainder of the first paragraph of the book.

Some opening lines are just awful, the most famous of which, written by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton in 1830, has given birth to the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst first line of a book: "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Some of my personal favorites are:

“There's a bullet in my chest, less than a centimeter from my heart.” (A Cold Day in Paradise by Steve Hamilton)

"I was trapped in a house with a lawyer, a bare-breasted woman and a dead man. The rattlesnake in the paper sack only complicated matters." (Fat Tuesday by Earl Emerson)

"My day didn't start with murder, although the thought crossed my mind." (Fool's Puzzle by Earlene Fowler)

"As dead people went, Bess Leander smelled pretty good: lavender, sage and a hint of clove." (The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove, by Christopher Moore)

And, of course: “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” (The Princess Bride by William Goldman)

I've even been told the opening lines of my own Never Say Die aren't too bad:

"Zoey Morgan had once heard the cynical adage, 'Any day you don't wake up in a chalk outline is a good day.' Oh, yeah? she thought now. What if that's precisely where you awoke? What kind of day was it then? Obviously, your last."

So, what are some of your favorite opening lines?

Happy reading, and remember — don’t always judge a book by its cover or even by its opening lines. The best part doesn't always come at the beginning. But sometimes what's there is pretty good

LET THERE BE LIGHT!

Marlys

God or somebody said that and so did the eye surgeon.  And wow.  I am in awe.  I can see every needle on the neighbor’s pine trees and every ponderosa on the mountainside almost half a mile away.  I can see all the birds and even the dead seeds on our confused poplars.  I don’t know why they’re so confused.  We’ll have a few days of balmy 50's and 60's and then a raging blizzard and sub zero winds.  Winter and often spring have always been like that in Boulder, at least for the forty some years I’ve lived here.  I just don’t remember it confusing the trees before,
when I was busy.  Now that I sit around recovering from one or the other surgical procedure, I notice things–like how easy it would be to go raging crazy.

You try to write our instant weather into a story and get it past an editor.  Somebody commits a murder and tucks the body under a bush on a nice sunshiny day, then drives into town to buy a shovel to bury the body and while he’s in the hardware store a blizzard literally roars down the front range and buries the body and the bush and his car gets stuck and . . . see what I mean?  Probably, a few days or hours later a hot wind rides the Rockies up from Texas and melts everything and the victim is apparent under the bush and a mile away his murderer is found dead in a melting ditch on a road nearby in his car with a brand new shovel.  See what I mean?  If you lived anyplace else you’d blame it all on global warming, but in and around Boulder we call it $%#@&ing, but normal, weather.  (Okay, so he hit his head on the dash and died before he could shovel his way out of the car.)
So Buffalo has the Lake effect, we’ve got the foothill effect but it’s not as predictable, you can’t count on it.

Anyway, I digress.  I have had cataracts removed from both eyes a week apart and yesterday had the horrible boot removed from the surgically refigured foot.  I’ve had contacts–one for far vision and one for close (reading) for so many years I gambled on implanting a similar method to fix my vision in hopes of not having to wear glasses.  (Honest  to goddess as I’m keying this in wind is blowing so hard that it’s picking up snow on the ground. blowing airborne birds past the feeder where they were heading straight on to points east, and the sun is shining like it’s a nice day.  No problem as long as it’s nobody’s roof (woops, there goes a garbage can on its way to somebody’s window or Nebraska.)  I’ve had contacts working this way for years, one eye for distance, the other for reading  and hope the eyes are so used to it that I will automatically go back to seeing that way.  Without glasses.   I have friends who have worn glasses so long they think their faces look funny without them.  They wear clear glasses with magnifying semi-circles at the bottom.  If the heroine or hero, in a story or movie is not a “character” how often do they wear glasses?   Inspector Linley not withstanding.   It is rare.

But the biggest thing is that I’ll be able to read again, comfortably.  By the time I’ve worked on the computer, read the paper, the e-mail and various necessary things like bills etc. my eyes don’t want to read all the books I get for presents because I’m a writer.   And I’m looking forward to walking comfortably and driving my car and hiking up to the mountains I’m admiring so from a distance now.  Think what the view will be there.  And getting my poor body back to the gym and my favorite torturess.  There’s no water boarding there but little sympathy for those of us who don’t  work out daily and have mighty muscles in this town.

It’s time to get up and get moving but not until the second eye is confirmed healthy and happy and the foot doesn’t need icing and elevating and the freaking wind settles down.  Then I’ll wade into a completed but ailing book manuscript and it wouldn’t hurt to answer some Christmas letters.  There’s all kinds of things you can do with one eye and a foot propped up on a stool besides grouse.  Not to mention the looming trip to Africa . . . . think I’ll take a nap.

Afterward–it’s working!   Just drove my car and can read licence plates near and far.

Winter Travels

I've been travelling around the world lately. In winter months when we have snow and frigid temps here, I like to escape to my jet-propelled reading chair and fly away to exciting new places.

Before I start, I go through my pre-flight checklist. Fuel (chocolate biscotti and a pot of PG Tips tea) - check. Blanket (for high-altitude chills and scenes set in freezing weather like Alaska or the Upper Peninsula) - check. Trusty sidekick (a full-figured Tabby who insists on being in the middle of everything) - check. Headphones (in case hubby has The Wire turned up too high) - check. Once all systems are go, it's Arrivederci, Ciao, and I am Elsewhere, baby. Here are a few of the take-me-away books I've been reading:

HOLY SMOKE by Tonino Benacquista was a fun read set in France and Italy. A young man reluctantly leaves his Paris home (who wouldn't be reluctant?) to return to the tiny Italian village his family came from. He does this to figure out why a murdered friend left him four worthless acres, a vineyard that has never produced a drinkable bottle of wine. Soon the mafia, the Vatican, American gangsters and villagers make him feel they're all out to get him. A light-hearted book that is molto Italiano.

IN THE WOODS by Tana French is set in my favorite virtually-visited country, the land of magic, great literature and outstanding beverages, Ireland. The body of a teenage girl is found in the same woods where, twenty years earlier, two kids disappeared. A third boy was found alive but traumatized and unable to remember anything that happened, to himself or to his friends. Now, he's grown and is a police detective. This book will be in my top ten of the year. Beautiful writing and good character development.

DOWN RIVER by John Hart isn't set in an exotic faraway country, but the sense of place that Hart gives us in this North Carolina setting pulled me in completely. A young man returns home after living in exile in New York City. Though he was acquitted of a murder, his family and most everyone in town still believes he is guilty. When he comes home, he finds the town is pressuring his father to sell part of their farm, four hundred acres that has been in the family for many generations. What a book. Fast-paced, great story, great plot and hard to put down. Another top ten read.

SPIDER TRAP by Barry Maitland is an excellent police procedural that takes place in the greatest city in the world, London. It's not the tourist side of town, but South London where neighborhoods are poor and the crime rates high. The bodies of two girls are found, and when the area around them is searched, the police also find three shallow graves with old bones in them. Detective Brock heads up the team to find out if the deaths are related to a criminal family he dealt with many years earlier. Another outstanding book that kept me turning pages far into the night.

A very good winter for me so far. Happy book travels!

Re-Reading

Since Dana's talked about treasures from the past, I'm reminded of one of my favorite pastimes, one I don't often get to indulge these days. I'm talking, of course, about re-reading. I have so much to read these days, so many new things, that I don't get to experience books twice the way I used to. When I was young, I read books two or three times, and there was nothing extraordinary about it. Our library was limited, especially for a voracious reader like me. I must have read "Jane Eyre" seven times, and "Pride and Prejudice" at least that many. I was also very enamored of Lloyd C. Douglas's sentimental "The Robe," and "Gone With the Wind" was a big favorite, too.

My reading time is shorter now, both because I work and have the running of a household, and also have older eyes that can only take so much computer screen/book page time per day. My shelves are piled with TBR books, and they're on the shelves for a reason; they sound good to me, or maybe they're by writers I've enjoyed in the past, and I really want to get to them. None of them are what I used to think of as "filler" books -- things I read because I couldn't find anything better.

What's gone by the wayside is the luxury of slowly re-reading books that I loved the first time around. This second perusal serves a lot of purposes. First there's the sheer pleasure of it. Second, there's usually a reason I want to look at the book again; I've learned something from the way it was written, a lesson I want to make sure I've absorbed. (More about that later.) Third, there's my sense of the writer's full body of work, and details that make up the portrait of the protagonist I want to be sure I've included. That's why I'd like to read all of Kim Harrison's books again, and someday I'd like to take Lee Child's books in order, slowly; Jim Butcher's, too.

Scenes I go over with a microscope include such diverse ones as: the dragon Temeraire meeting his 'human' for the first time in Naomi Novik's excellent HIS MAJESTY'S DRAGON . . . Lestat the vampire talking face to face with a member of the Talamasca, in Anne Rice's THE VAMPIRE LESTAT . . . Connie Willis's time traveller in THE DOOMSDAY BOOK, when she realizes she has come to the wrong time . . . Jane's meeting with the ruined Mr. Rochester after the fire in Bronte's JANE EYRE. I could go on and on. These scenes have taught me something about writing, or something about the human condition, that made me feel like a better craftsman or a better person for having read them. I'm sure you could all name similar scenes, or revelations you've had after reading books, that made you want to read them again and again.

The best time for second-time-around books is on plane trips, or any trip, for that matter. I travel a lot, beginning in the spring, and ending with the end of summer. Some of those travels are professional, when I'm on book tour, and some are personal, when I'm watching our daughter play tournament ball in the summer. Either way, a book I've already broken in is perfect. I'm not so intent that I miss a gate change (I've done that before) and if I lose my place, it's not a huge problem to find it again. I have big plans for this summer's reading program . . . and I hope you do, too.