In an interview with recently deceased author Paul Auster, he says the following:
When I was 9 or 10, my grandmother gave me a six-volume collection of books by Robert Louis Stevenson, which inspired me to start writing stories that began with scintillating sentences like this one: “In the year of our Lord 1751, I found myself staggering around blindly in a raging snowstorm, trying to make my way back to my ancestral home.”
This encouraged me to browse my bookshelf and search for those scintillating first sentences. As it turns out, many of the books that I loved the most really do pack a punch before the end of their first paragraph. Here’s my personal selection. Unlike Auster’s example, the ones I am sharing do not immediately drop you in the middle of the action, as the number of adventure books on my bookshelf is marginal. However, I do feel they capture a lot about the protagonist and set the tone for the novel.
I would love for you to share yours.
The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster:
I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain.
Moon Palace by Paul Auster:
It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future.
The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin by David Nobbs
When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus.
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Easily Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas for me.
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Most books start off fairly slow but this one hits the ground running after doing cocaine and jumping out of a fuckin’ jet.
“The boys were early for the hanging.” (from memory, not sure about the exact wording, as I read this book 20 years ago)
The small boys came early to the hanging.
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Correct!
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact,I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
Bill Bryson - A short history of nearly everything
Hunter S. Thompson - Hell’s Angels:
"California, Labor Day weekend … early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur …The Menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches … Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more … tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder …
Surprisingly, I didn’t see anyone referencing the start of “Blood Rites” by Jim Butcher; it’s usually among the top answers.
“The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want for a wife.
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
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I remember the book Feed by Mira Grant having an opening scene that 100% full throttle right away. I looked it up just now. It’s not quite how I remember it, but it’s good and it was a great book, so I’m commenting with the quote here.
It’s amazing what you can use for a ramp, given the right motivation. Someone’s collapsed fence was blocking half the road, jutting up at an angle, and I hit it at about fifty miles an hour. The handlebars shuddered in my hands like the horns of a mechanical bull, and the shocks weren’t doing much better. I didn’t even have to check the road in front of us because the moaning started as soon as we came into view. They’d blocked our exit fairly well while Shaun played with his little friend, and mindless plague carriers or not, they had a better grasp of the local geography than we did. We still had one advantage: Zombies aren’t good at predicting suicide charges. And if there’s a better term for driving up the side of a hill at fifty miles an hour with the goal of actually achieving flight when you run out of “up,” I don’t think I want to hear it.
Okay. A couple of others now that I’m thinking about them.
From The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente, a book about an Earth swallowed by rising seas:
MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeline Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother, Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears. But he doesn’t visit anymore.
Also by Valente, the opening for Osmo Unknown and the Penny Woods
Once upon a time, in the beginning of the world, a certain peculiar Forest fell in love with a deep, craggy Valley. The Forest was very dashing. For a forest. Full of tall, thick trees and soft meadows and thorny brambles and a number of clever, bushy animals. The Valley was quite the catch as well, full of great big blue stones and clover and fat black hens and orange flowers. The whole wide earth agreed it was a very good match. And so the Forest and the Valley decided to do as folk have always done and settle down together to see what they might make between the two of them. They put their heads together and tinkered with the stones and the sky and the moon and the autumn and the spring. They pottered about with mushy dirt and rainstorms and exciting new sorts of pumpkins. They went abso- lutely bonkers over mushrooms. They experimented rashly with a year boasting four hundred and seventy-eight days, rather than the usual three hundred and sixty-five. They dabbled in badgers; hedgehogs; raccoons; bears both giant and pygmy; red-, green-, and blue-tailed deer; jackdaws; owls; parrots; cassowaries; flamingos; coots; herons; and pangolins. Most of these weren’t meant to live anywhere near the Forest or the Valley, but they were young and rebellious then and cared nothing for anyone else’s rules.
Simply because I have “circumnavigated” the books so many times, this line always gets me emotional to cast off with Aubrey and Maturin again.
The music-room in the governor’s house at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C major quartet. - Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
*When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked."
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley.
Wow. This couldn’t have come at a better time… Thanks for sharing this!
Neal Stephenson doesn’t waste a second with the opener to Seveneves:
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
He’s not going to explain why or how, he just gets it out of the way: it happens, now let’s get on with the story.
He absolutely explains how, like did you read the book? It was a mini black hole
But not the opening, that shit goes hard
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“In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.”
I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: if they think your’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.
Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.
Red sister by Mark Lawrence.
There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Stubb, and he almost deserved it.
