Opening Lines

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 he or 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 with a question, “Who is John Galt?” in Atlas Shrugged.

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 “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 plain 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 in-tervals, 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: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” (1984 by George Orwell) “Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this.” (One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane) And, of course, “This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” (The Princess Bride by William Goldman)

What are some of your favorite opening lines? Email me and we’ll publish a list of them in a future Book Talk column, maybe even make a contest out of it.

Happy reading, and remember – don’t always judge a book by its cover or by its opening line. Sometimes the best part isn’t the beginning. But sometimes it is!