Firsts

I have been thinking about first impressions, in life and in books...the first line of a novel is the hook which decides if one continues to read or not (really the first paragraph...but its more dramatic to see what a single line can offer). I, thus, provide you with a random sampling of first lines from my limited library. You will see that Jane Austen cheats with punctuation. I separated out novels and short stories to see if short stories try harder, as they have a smaller amount of time to progress their plot. You decide.

Novels:

When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. Ellen Foster

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. The Hunger Games

"Tom!" No answer. "Tom!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!" No answer. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

To begin with the old rigmarole of childhood. Wives and Daughters

I never had sex with my father but I would have, if he had agreed. Iodine

She scowled at her glass of orange juice. The Blue Sword

It's a funny thing about mothers and fathers. Matilda

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century - and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed - this was the page at which the favourite volume always opened: Elliot of Kellynch-Hall. Persuasion

I seemed to be standing in a busy queue by the side of a long, mean street. The Great Divorce

Charles Howard had the feel of a gigantic onrushing machine: You had to either climb on or leap out of the way. Seabiscuit

Short Stories:

"Unsolved Mysteries." Raymond West blew out a cloud of smoke and repeated the words with a kid on deliberate self-conscious pleasure. Miss Marple

The Superior Wallcoverings Wildcats were playing in the Little League championship game, and I wanted them to lose. The Smile on Happy Chang's Face

Your Father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat. Until Gwen

Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. Anda's Game.

He did not have friends. Simple Exercises for the Beginning Student

They caught him after he had killed the second man. Old Boys, Old Girls

He had a weird growth along his dorsal fin and that gape-mouthed grimace you see in older fish. The Secret Goldfish

When I was sixteen I was high most of the time. Natasha

In a lovely urban coincidence, the last two houses on our block were both occupied by widows who had lost their husbands in Eastern European pogroms. Bohemians