Book with best opening paragraph

[diebitter]

Here's my choice for this. Do you know better?

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

[Dynasty]

How can that be the best? I don't even want to read the second paragraph.

[beta1607]

[ QUOTE ]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

[/ QUOTE ]

[TheBlueMonster]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]
award for most long winded and redundant.

[Los Feliz Slim]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

[/ QUOTE ]

[/ QUOTE ]
award for most long winded and redundant.

[/ QUOTE ]

Just reading that paragraph made me want to forget how to read.

Wasn't he getting paid by the word or something? Or is that a myth?

[Peter666]

"I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor
for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.
Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine,
anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am
superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you
probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I
can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my
spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not
consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only
injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is
from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"

[tdarko]

when nobody had posted in this i was thinking how i couldn't wait for someone to list a tale of two cities so i could tell them how god awful of a choice it was...so thanks, its a god awful choice.

pick something original.

[tolbiny]

It saves you from having to read the rest of the book- gotta be worth something.

[TheBlueMonster]

from "The Rings of Saturn" by WG Sebald:

"
In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work. And in fact my hope was realized, up to a point; for I have seldom felt so carefree as I did then, walking for hours in the day through the thinly populated countryside, which stretches inland from the coast. I wonder now, however, whether there might be something in the old superstition that certain ailments of the spirit and of the body are particularly likely to beset us under the sign of the Dog Star. At all events, in retrospect I became preoccupied not only with the unaccustomed sense of freedom but also with the paralysing horror that had come over me at various times when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place. Perhaps it was because of this that, a year to the day after I began my tour, I was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility. It was then that I began in my thoughts to write these pages. I can remember precisely how, upon being admitted to that room on the eighth floor, I became overwhelmed by the feeling that the Suffolk expanses I had walked the previous summer had now shrunk once and for all to a single, blind, insensate spot. Indeed, all that could be seen of the world from my bed was the colourless patch of sky framed in the window. Several times during the day I felt a desire to assure myself of a reality I feared had vanished forever by looking out of that hospital window, which, for some strange reason, was draped with black netting, and as dusk fell the wish became so strong that, contriving to slip over the edge of the bed to the floor, half on my belly and half sideways, and then to reach the wall on all fours, I dragged myself, despite the pain, up to the window sill. In the tortured posture of a creature that has raised itself erect for the first time I stood leaning against the glass. I could not help thinking of the scene in which poor Gregor Samsa, his little legs trembling, climbs the armchair and looks out of his room, no longer remembering (so Kafka's narrative goes) the sense of liberation that gazing out of the window had formerly given him. And just as Gregor's dimmed eyes failed to recognize the quiet street where he and his family had lived for years, taking CharlottenstraBe for a grey wasteland, so I too found the familiar city, extending from the hospital courtyards to the far horizon, an utterly alien place. I could not believe that anything might still be alive in that maze of buildings down there; rather, it was as if I were looking down from a cliff upon a sea of stone or a field of rubble, from which the tenebrous masses of multi-storey carparks rose up like immense boulders. At that twilit hour there were no passers-by to be seen in the immediate vicinity, but for a nurse crossing the cheerless gardens outside the hospital entrance on the way to her night shift. An ambulance with its light flashing was negotiating a number of turns on its way from the city centre to Casualty. I could not hear its siren; at that height I was cocooned in an almost complete and, as it were, artificial silence. All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears."

[tdarko]

tl;dr

[TheBlueMonster]

[ QUOTE ]
tl;dr

[/ QUOTE ]
yea I figured it was too long, but I could cut it down. It would lose alot if I did.

[A_C_Slater]

Tralala was 15 the first time she was laid. There was no real passion. Just diversion. She hungout in the Greeks with the other neighborhood kids. Nothin to do. Sit and talk. Listen to the jukebox. Drink coffee. Bum cigarettes. Everything a drag. She said yes. In the park. 3 or 4 couples finding their own tree and grass. Actually she didn't say yes. She said nothing. Tony or Vinnie or whoever it was just continued.

[man]

I'm amazed by how many people can't follow directions.

this probably isn't the best, but it's good. mr. vertigo, by paul auster.

"I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I'm not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight. Master Yehudi found me when I was nine, an orphan boy begging nickels on the streets of Saint Louis, and he worked with me steadily for three years before he let me show my stuff in public. That was in 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh, the precise year when night began to fall on the world forever. I kept it up until a few days befor ethe October crash, and what I did was greater than anything those two gents could have dreamed of. I did was no American had done before me, what no one has done ever since."

[Blarg]

Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin.

-- Metamorphosis, by Kafka

I don't remember if there's more to the first paragraph, but who cares. What an opener!

[diebitter]

Yah, good opener. The only other really striking one I know is from a pulp read by Robert Bloch, called 'The Scarf'

It is:

Fetish? You name it. All I know is that I've always had to have it with me..


Darn, I'm hijacking my own threads now!

[Matt Flynn]

"It was a dark and stormy night. The rain fell into my shot glass, dampening my spirits."

Pure poetry.

[AceHigh]

[ QUOTE ]
Wasn't he getting paid by the word or something? Or is that a myth?

[/ QUOTE ]

Dickens originally wrote a Tale of Two Cities as a series of articles for a periodical. So in a sense he was paid per chapter.

[Eihli]

I like that one. What's it from?

[edtost]

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."

[Dominic]

Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
How can that be the best? I don't even want to read the second paragraph.

[/ QUOTE ]

then you're an idiot.

[DrPublo]

Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[Conspir8or]

Actually this (the Jackson graf) is one of my favorite book openings. Good choice.

Another favorite:

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
—William Gibson, Neuromancer

[EvanJC]

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where i was born, and what my lousy childhood was like..." etc

[peachy]

Dickens - Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

[DrSavage]

[ QUOTE ]
Maman died yesterday. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: "Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours." That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

[/ QUOTE ]

Camus, "The Stranger"

[Blarg]

I don't think it would be hard at all to find a better opening paragraph than that.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

[/ QUOTE ]

Definitely a good one. I think everyone fell in love with Nabokov at least a little when they first read those lines. I've known a couple of people who had it memorized and loved to recite it.

[gamblore99]

[ QUOTE ]
Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

[/ QUOTE ]

This book sounds really interesting. What is the name of it?

[Blarg]

I love the writing in The Haunting of Hill House, too. She was wonderful in noting the terrifying effect of geometries that don't seem to work right and make sense, the sort of eeriness merging into horror of ordinary things that are just somehow not quite right. Lovecraft had a similar sense of the pure terror of the merely familiar somehow quietly violating ordinary laws.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

[/ QUOTE ]

This book sounds really interesting. What is the name of it?

[/ QUOTE ]

heheh

[TheBlueMonster]

ok. awesome

[eviljeff]

[ QUOTE ]
pick something original.

[/ QUOTE ]

right, Dickens was a complete hack.

I'm guessing the version of A Tale of Two Cities you read was about 50 pages thick and had a black and yellow striped cover.

[Blarg]

LOL.

That seems a very unfair characterization of Dickens, though, to say the least.

[poker-penguin]

[ QUOTE ]
Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you, I was about to add this one, mainly because I love the first sentence (and the rest of the book).

[private joker]

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[Phoenix1010]

"The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its kindly warmth. Three times the mail had come with undesired letters and circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found it convenient today to omit the thought exercies. I had been for an hour's walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns penciiled against the sky. That was delightful. So was the reading of the old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day or rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days when I calmly wonder, obective and fearless, whether it isn't time to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have an accident while shaving."

Hermann Hesse- Steppenwolf

[Phoenix1010]

Whoever took care of Notes From Underground and Catch 22, I love you guys. Those are my other two choices.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you, I was about to add this one, mainly because I love the first sentence (and the rest of the book).

[/ QUOTE ]

Except that the question was best paragraph...not paragraphs. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[jason_t]

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquiades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquiades' magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." Jose' Arcadio Buendia, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquiades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But Jose Arcadio Buendia at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Ursula Iguaran, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. "Very soon we'll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquiades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When Jose Arcadio Buendia and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.

[jason_t]

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

[jason_t]

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. ta.

[Blarg]

It's time for people to start putting up the names of the stuff they're quoting. I think I'm guessing pretty well, but nobody's going to know how to pursue reading a book further without the title.

By the way, is that 100 Years of Solitude?

[private joker]

[ QUOTE ]
It's time for people to start putting up the names of the stuff they're quoting. I think I'm guessing pretty well, but nobody's going to know how to pursue reading a book further without the title.

By the way, is that 100 Years of Solitude?

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you look at the subject line of the post you just wrote? /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Blarg]

This is the first time in OOT I've ever seen anyone besides me mention Italo Calvino, and it's gratifying to see. He's one of my favorites, and one hell of a good writer.

[private joker]

[ QUOTE ]
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. ta.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good call Jason -- because nobody has posted this yet. You're on the ball with it! /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It's time for people to start putting up the names of the stuff they're quoting. I think I'm guessing pretty well, but nobody's going to know how to pursue reading a book further without the title.

By the way, is that 100 Years of Solitude?

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you look at the subject line of the post you just wrote? /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

LOL, no. I don't think I ever look at 'em!

[jason_t]

A man went to knock at the king's door and said, Give me a boat. The king's house had many other doors, but this was the door for petitions. Since the king spent all his time sitting at the door for favors (favors being offered to the king, you understand), whenever he heard someone knocking at the door for petitions, he would pretend not to hear, and only when the continuous pounding of the bronze doorknocker became not just deafening, but positively scandalous, disturbing the peace of the neighborhood (people would start muttering, What kind of king is he if he won't even answer the door), only then would he order the first secretary to go and find out what the supplicant wanted, since there seemed no way of silencing him. Then, the first secretary would call the second secretary, who would give orders to the first assitant who would, in turn, give orders to the second assitant, and so on all the way down the line to the cleaning woman, who, having no one else to give orders to, would half-open the door and ask through the crack, What do you want. The supplicant would state his business, that is, he would ask what he had come to ask, then he would wait by the door for his request to trace the path back, person by person, to the king. The king, occupied as usual with the favors being offered him, would take a long time to reply, and it was no small measure of his concern for the happiness and well-being of his people that he would, finally, resolve to ask the first secretary for an authoritative opinion in write, the first secretary, needless to say, would pass on the command to the second secretary, who would pass it on to the the third secretary, and so on down once again to the cleaning woman, who would give a yes or a no depending on what kind of mood she was in.

[jason_t]

Above the door frame is a long, narrow plaque of enamelled metal. The black letters set against a white background say Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Here and there the enamel is cracked and chipped. The door is an old door, the most recent layer of brown paint is beginning to peel, and the exposed grain of the wood is reminiscent of a striped pelt. There are five windows along the facde. As soon as you cross the threshold, you notice the smell of old paper. It's true that not a day passes without new pieces of paper entering the Central Registry, papers referring to individuals of the male sex and of the female sex who continue to be born in the outside world, but the smell never changes, in the first place, because the fate of all paper, from the moment it leaves the factory, is to begin to grow old, in the second place, because on the older pieces of paper, but often on the new paper too, not a day passes without someone's inscribing it with the causes of death and the respective places and dates, each contributing its own particular smells, not always offensive to the olfactory mucous membrane, a case in point being the aromatic effluvia which, from time to time, waft lightly through the Central Registry, and which the more discriminating noses identity as a perfume that is half rose and half chrysanthemum.

[Blarg]

Those two seemed bloated and put me to sleep.

[11t]

I was sick that nobody posted this before me.

This is the best opening paragraph of any book/short story by far.

Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher:

"During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was-but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferble; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of the half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me-upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain-upon the bleak walls-upon the vacant eye-like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more proplery than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium-the bitter lapse of every day life-the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart-an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it-I paused to think-what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possbile, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my house to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down-but with a shudder even more thrilling than before-upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghstly tree-stems, and the vacant eye-like windows."

You have all been pwned.

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
Those two seemed bloated and put me to sleep.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's too bad. Jose Saramago is brilliant.

[Blarg]

Very nice, but Kafka kicks its ass.

[ElSapo]

[ QUOTE ]
I like that one. What's it from?

[/ QUOTE ]

The whole "dark and stormy night" line comes from a novel, Paul Clifford, wriiten in the 1800s by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The actual first paragraph, considered to be among the -worst- ever written, goes like this...

"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."

...there's an annual fiction contest for the worst writing every year, found here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

...long story short, I think Matt Flynn was joking.

[private joker]

[ QUOTE ]
"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[/ QUOTE ]

By the way, this was "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk.

[Blarg]

Perhaps. But I generally like a short entry. I don't like the feeling that you are beginning to begin to begin, and that the way things are dragging on, you may finally never even get that far. I like a start that grabs. No matter what the tone or length of the work. I want the writer to reel me in rather than let out more and more line while I wait and eventually tire myself out so he can slowly drag my defeated carcass in without a fight. I want him to earn my confidence and goodwill at the beginning, not assume it.

I want him to make me say, How could I stop? rather than Why should I continue?

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I like that one. What's it from?

[/ QUOTE ]

The whole "dark and stormy night" line comes from a novel, Paul Clifford, wriiten in the 1800s by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The actual first paragraph, considered to be among the -worst- ever written, goes like this...

"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."

...there's an annual fiction contest for the worst writing every year, found here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

...long story short, I think Matt Flynn was joking.

[/ QUOTE ]

It was a pity Snoopy never finished his novel.

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Nabakov - in his first novel using English:(!)

Lolita,light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo=lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

[/ QUOTE ]

This book sounds really interesting. What is the name of it?

[/ QUOTE ]

In Cold Blood

[Argus]

[ QUOTE ]
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

[/ QUOTE ]
My respect for you just increased tenfold. An ex girlfriend gave me this book and I greatly enjoyed it. A very unique style and an excellent read.

[Blarg]

He's got wildly varying styles and he's great at all of them. If you liked that work, don't hesitate to try out his other stuff. Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books. The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, and The Argentinian Ant are all good starting points. I think everyone should read Cosmicomics. It's a collection of short stories that is one of the most amazingly inventive things ever written. (And it's not a comic.)

He also did a fantastic collection of Italian fairy tales. He's kind of his country's Brothers Grimm. There's an incredible amount of pleasure to be had there, and even if you've read countless collections of folktales, you'll still find new, interesting fun there.

[Wired Jokers]

Classic: Dickens, Tale of Two Cites (mentioned above)

Modern: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." - Steven King, The Gunslinger

I like brevity.

[Rev. Good Will]

Looks like I got to this before CMI

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistal and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quitely take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some tiem or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

[nomadtla]

[ QUOTE ]
Dickens, Steven King, I like brevity.

[/ QUOTE ]

Is it just me or is one of these things not like the other /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[Forbin]

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?"

[Rev. Good Will]

[ QUOTE ]
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?"

[/ QUOTE ]

nh

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
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?"

[/ QUOTE ]

Meh. I've never been a fan.

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
He's got wildly varying styles and he's great at all of them. If you liked that work, don't hesitate to try out his other stuff. Invisible Cities is one of my favorite books. The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, and The Argentinian Ant are all good starting points. I think everyone should read Cosmicomics. It's a collection of short stories that is one of the most amazingly inventive things ever written. (And it's not a comic.)

He also did a fantastic collection of Italian fairy tales. He's kind of his country's Brothers Grimm. There's an incredible amount of pleasure to be had there, and even if you've read countless collections of folktales, you'll still find new, interesting fun there.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would like to add The Nonexistant Knight and the Cloven Viscount to your list.

[jakethebake]

This sucks. All my favorite books have crappy first paragraphs. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[ QUOTE ]
In memory it seems someone else, a boy in a glen plaid suit and a lime green shirt chewing gum with a cigarette behind his ear while he danced awkwardly with a girl who made his stomach buzz, and Frankie Laine sang "Black Lace" on the record player. But it wasn't someone else, it was me, or at least the beginning of me. It was the evening I was born: an embryonic kid with his hair slicked back, I danced, for the first time, with Jennifer Grayle; and the flowering of my soul was forever wed to a vision of the possibility so gorgeous and unspeakable that even now it seems a trick of time and memory. No child could have felt what I felt. And yet...the buzz in my stomach has buzzed for thirty years and buzzes still, an implacable thrill of passion and purpose that has galvanized me like the touch of God's finger on Adam's inert hand.

[/ QUOTE ]

[DrPublo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Catch-22 by Heller.

"It was love at first sight.
"The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.
"Yossarian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn't quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they could treat it. If it didn't become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them."

The Doc

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you, I was about to add this one, mainly because I love the first sentence (and the rest of the book).

[/ QUOTE ]

Except that the question was best paragraph...not paragraphs. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

Fair enough except I think that the paradox of sorts in the 3rd paragraph is a great introduction to the rest of the book. And it only cost you two extra sentences of reading.

The Doc

[DrPublo]

I can't believe no one mentioned this one yet:

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Doc

[RJT]

The Op asks “Book with best opening paragraph.”

Reply to a reply:

[ QUOTE ]
pick something original.

[/ QUOTE ]

Gotta love OOT. /images/graemlins/wink.gif

[Blarg]

Those are good too. Almost all of his stuff is very good to exceptional. And I'm not convinced that anything I didn't like didn't largely come down to personal taste rather than quality.

I looked up 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller...' on Amazon to post it's first paragraph here, but I was beat to it. Best book I've ever read. Any of you Calvino fans familiar with Jorge Luis Borges? If not, you really should be, I imagine you'd love him too. The opening from one of his short stories follows:

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The unnerving mirror hung at the end of a corridor in a villa on Calle Goana, in Ramos Meija; the misleading encyclopedia goes by the name of The Anglo-American Cyclopedia (New York, 1917), and is a literal reprint of the 1902 Encyclopedia Britannica. The whole affair happened some five years ago. Bioy Casares had dined with me that night and talked to us at length about a great scheme for writing a novel in the first person, using a narrator who omitted or corrupted what happened and who ran into various contradictions, so that only a handful of readers - a very small handful - would be able to decipher the horrible or banal reality behind the novel. From the far end of the corridor, the mirror was watching us; and we discovered, with the inevitability of discoveries made late at night, that mirrors have something grotesque about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men."

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
I looked up 'If On A Winter's Night A Traveller...' on Amazon to post it's first paragraph here, but I was beat to it. Best book I've ever read. Any of you Calvino fans familiar with Jorge Luis Borges? If not, you really should be, I imagine you'd love him too.

[/ QUOTE ]

I love him too. I wanted to post the opening to The Book of Sand, but I lent my copy of his Fictions to a friend. /images/graemlins/frown.gif

Paul Theroux, 'Happy Isles Of Oceania'

(more striking perhaps because it's not a novel but a travelogue)

"There was no good word in english for this hopeless farewell. My wife and I seperated on a winter day in London and we were both miserable, because it seemed as though our marriage was over. We both though: What now? It was the most sorrowful of goodbyes. I could not imagine life without her. I tried to console myself by saying: This is like going on a journey, because a journey can be either your death or your transformation, though on this one I imagined I would just keep living a half-life."

Most people today misunderstand poker. Let's be frank: most people know poker from the low-stakes games they now play(or grew up playing) with their family and friends. In these low-stakes home games, luck often plays a much bigger role than skill.

Play Poker Like the Pros
-Phil Hellmuth, Jr.
2003

[Danenania]

[ QUOTE ]
I am living here at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.

[/ QUOTE ]

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer


I agree with others that the opening of Lolita is amazing. Lolita also has the best ending lines that I've ever read. It still gives me chills and I've probably read over it 20+ times. Obviously there is no point in quoting endings as they are inextribably tied in with the entirety of the novel. But it's good, trust me.

If on a winter's night a traveler is also unforgettable.

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone."

I also recall a fun Vonnegut opening in Cat's Cradle. "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John."

[nothumb]

[ QUOTE ]
It's time for people to start putting up the names of the stuff they're quoting. I think I'm guessing pretty well, but nobody's going to know how to pursue reading a book further without the title.

By the way, is that 100 Years of Solitude?

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, great choice.

NT

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]


I agree with others that the opening of Lolita is amazing. Lolita also has the best ending lines that I've ever read. It still gives me chills and I've probably read over it 20+ times. Obviously there is no point in quoting endings as they are inextribably tied in with the entirety of the novel. But it's good, trust me.

[/ QUOTE ]

Lolita is a never-ending rush of amazing passages. This is one of my favorite (especially the "picnic, lightning" part).

I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects-paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

[diebitter]

[ QUOTE ]
I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively...

[/ QUOTE ]

Why am I envisaging Dr Evil saying this?

[sfer]

Out of recent reads, Motherless Brooklyn.

[Sightless]

[ QUOTE ]
"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[/ QUOTE ]

I was about to post the same thing, you win

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[/ QUOTE ]

By the way, this was "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk.

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you mean "Joke?" That's what he is.

[Sightless]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself. There has to be something better on television. Or since you have so much time on your hands, maybe you could take a night course. Become a doctor. You could make something out of yourself. Treat yourself to a dinner out. Color your hair. You're not getting any younger. What happens here is first going to piss you off. After that it just gets worse and worse."

[/ QUOTE ]

By the way, this was "Choke" by Chuck Palahniuk.

[/ QUOTE ]

Did you mean "Joke?" That's what he is.

[/ QUOTE ]

is this your attempt at humor?

[jason_t]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Did you mean "Joke?" That's what he is.

[/ QUOTE ]

is this your attempt at humor?

[/ QUOTE ]

It was my attempt at a statement of opinion.

[Danenania]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Did you mean "Joke?" That's what he is.

[/ QUOTE ]

is this your attempt at humor?

[/ QUOTE ]

It was my attempt at a statement of opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]

Agreed. I liked him in high school then grew up a bit. Don Delillo does everything Palahniuk does and a whole lot more in his writing.

[TheWorstPlayer]

[ QUOTE ]
Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh - a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.

[/ QUOTE ]

Can anyone guess the book? One of my absolute favorites. Obviously no using Google, you cheaters.

[diebitter]

Rushdie? Eco?

[TheWorstPlayer]

[ QUOTE ]
Rushdie? Eco?

[/ QUOTE ]
No. No. Did you like the opening?

[jason_t]

Eunoia. [censored] infuriating.

[diebitter]

No, not really. Sorry /images/graemlins/frown.gif

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. ta.

[/ QUOTE ]

Good call Jason -- because nobody has posted this yet. You're on the ball with it! /images/graemlins/grin.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

hell, I even put "Lolita" in the subject line!

[SeaSiren]

"Prince of Tides" by Pat Conroy has an opening that's an example of dramatic truth, I love reading it out loud... I read much of that book aloud, his words are delicious. Here's the opening ... and thanks for this topic (a little cerebral for OOT don't ya think?? good!)

"My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call. I grew up slowly beside the tides and marshes of Colleton; my arms were tawny and strong from working long days on the shrimp boat in the blazing South Carolina heat. Because I was a Wingo, I worked as soon as I could walk; I could pick a blue crab dean when I was five. I had killed my first deer by the age of seven, and at nine was regularly putting meat on my family´s table. I was born and raised on a Carolina sea island and I carried the sunshine of the low-country, inked in dark gold, on my back and shoulders. As a boy I was happy above the channels, navigating a small boat between the sandbars with their quiet nation of oysters exposed on the brown flats at the low watermark. I knew every shrimper by name, and they knew me and sounded their horns when they passed me fishing in the river. <font color="brown"> </font>

[TheWorstPlayer]

[ QUOTE ]
Eunoia. [censored] infuriating.

[/ QUOTE ]
Infuriating? I am SOOOOOO happy that someone spent 7 years of their life writing that thing. It is SOOOOOO awesome. Where did you encounter it?

[MyTurn2Raise]

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

I believe that what seperates humanity from everything else in the world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given monet to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.

[MyTurn2Raise]

"Who is John Galt?" in Atlas Shrugged

"Howard Roark laughed." in The Fountainhead

so simple, but set up the books so well

[trojanrabbit]

I don't know about the first paragraph, but I've always said that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash has the best first 10 pages of any book I've read. Totally bad-ass. /images/graemlins/cool.gif

[incognito]

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

[Rick Nebiolo]

"WHAT MAKES IAGO EVIL? Some people ask. I never ask."

Joan Didion - "Play It As It Lays"

I'm not sure it's the best but it's the one I remember word for word.

~ Rick

[B Dids]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Did you mean "Joke?" That's what he is.

[/ QUOTE ]

is this your attempt at humor?

[/ QUOTE ]

It was my attempt at a statement of opinion.

[/ QUOTE ]

I haven't read anything beyond "Guts" and the paragraph that PJ posted, but I like the style of both a lot.

[B Dids]

[ QUOTE ]
"I am a sick man. ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I
believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my
disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor
for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors.
Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine,
anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am
superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you
probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I
can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my
spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not
consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only
injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is
from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!"

[/ QUOTE ]

I feel like I should know this, but I don't...

[BadBoyBenny]

Notes from the underground?

[PhatTBoll]

[ QUOTE ]
"Who is John Galt?" in Atlas Shrugged

"Howard Roark laughed." in The Fountainhead

so simple, but set up the books so well

[/ QUOTE ]

How about:

"We wrote a crappy book." in Anthem.

[BadBoyBenny]

The opening line of the Neuromance is a question in the original trivial pursuit genus edition.

[BadBoyBenny]

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Tolstoy

The first one I thought of, but I don't really agree with it.

[New001]

[ QUOTE ]
At the beginning of July, during an extremely hot spell, towards evening, a young man left the closet he rented from tenants in S_____y Lane, walked out to the street, and slowly, as if indecisively, headed for the K_____n Bridge.

[/ QUOTE ]