Great First Lines

by Celina Spiegel

For book lovers, literary trivia fans, and know-it-alls everywhere, here is an irresistible collection of literature's great opening sentences, cleverly arranged so that each line or phrase builds upon the one before it to create a unique story.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0449907228
• ISBN13: 9780449907221
• Release Date: May 1992
• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Not Just Trivia, by fermed

I should not have read it as I did: cover to cover in one sitting. A brief sitting, for sure, for it is a tiny book (4 x 6 inches, the size of a standard photograph) of 200 pages, each containing the opening lines of a famous book. But oh, what an experience it was. Like eating the most exquisite candies, one by one, till the box was empty. Listen: "On top of everything, the cancer wing was number 13." Or this one: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosembergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."The book can be used as a trivia quiz, of course. I'm sure Solzhenitsyn and Sylvia Plath jumped at you in the above quotations. Game one would be to read an opening line and ask someone to identify it. Alternatively, one could play a far more advanced game: asking someone to cite the opening lines of, say, "Lady Chatterly's Lover." The book is wonderfully indexed; and because the pages that contain the quotations do not have the name of the author or of the book, the fist index is from page number, to authot, to book. The second index contains the alphabetical list of authors; and the third lists the books cited.The book is cleverly organized with quotes arranged meaningfully whenever possible. Little did Vladimir Nabokov know that one day the opening of "Ada" would lie side by side with the opening of Anna Karenina, and that this would demonstrate that he, Nabokov, had forgotten Tolstoy's lines, and that no editor caught the slip. Said Tolstoy: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Nabokov's opening: "All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike, says a great Russian writer in the begining of a famous novel."I found a single error (in Kafka's "The Trial," of course). The book quotes: "Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning." "Maligned" should be substituted for "traduced" and then all is well.It is impossible to give awards for the best opening; and yet, there seems to be a consensus (or so I have read) that the most perfect opening of a novel, ever, belongs to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first sentence in "One Hundred Years of Solitude." It is this: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelio Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."This is a great little book. I dip into it more than I should, and its cover will not hold up much longer, but I have a sweet tooth for great writing. And, before I forget, Lady Chatterly opens thus: "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically."