Book with best opening paragraph
 

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."

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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.

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Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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.

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award for most long winded and redundant.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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.

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award for most long winded and redundant.

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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?

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

"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!"

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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."

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

tl;dr

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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tl;dr

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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."

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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!

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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!

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Pure poetry.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

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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.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

I like that one. What's it from?

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

"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."

Lolita
 

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.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

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then you're an idiot.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

"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

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Dickens - Tale of Two Cities

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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.

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Camus, "The Stranger"

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Lolita
 

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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.

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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.

Re: Lolita
 

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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.

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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.

Re: Lolita
 

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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.

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

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heheh

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

ok. awesome

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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pick something original.

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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.

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

LOL.

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

"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."

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

"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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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

Re: Book with best opening paragraph
 

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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

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

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

One Hundred Years of Solitude --- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 

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.