It’s a new year, so let’s start with “Marley was dead: to begin with” and “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” If you share my reading tastes, you know where those sentences first saw the light of day. What follows are some of the best and the worst opening lines (my call) from stories I read over the holidays.
What hope is there for a book that starts “Maureen Pascal, ensconced in the six-hundred-count luxury of the Manhattan hotel room provided by her publisher, thrashed about in the oversize bed”? I was tempted to send that line in to the Bulwer-Lytton contest, but my co-worker Becky had another idea. She suggested that Maureen might want to shop on the QVC channel for one-thousand-count sheets and thus reduce her tendency to thrash. I’m withholding the title to save you the pain of reading a book which includes phrases like:
¢ “sinister slits where their eyes should be”
¢ “expos[ing] her delicate neck to the blade that would separate it from her body”
¢ “an ominous wooden chopping block” (you probably saw that one coming)
I was looking forward to Aurelia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet. Fantasy, art, color – what’s not for me to like? Well, the first sentence, for one. “Aurelia lay still as death, like a discarded doll, in a burgundy tangle of rushes and spineweed, on the bank of a bend in the River Throanscall, when she was discovered by an old man who did not know her name.” Or, apparently, how to edit a sentence. However, this one has gotten a lot of good press and a devoted following, so it might do something for you that it didn’t do for me.
Kringle, by Tony Abbott, also opens with a run-on sentence, but one with a deliciously shivery feel to it: “Deep in the land of ghosts and frosts, back in the days of long ago, in the time before and a little to the left of the time we know now, when goblins roamed the land and rough tribes of men battled for this or that frozen inch of frozen earth, we might, if we turned out heads just so, peek through the eaves of a low-roofed hut, farther north than you or I would care to go, and see inside it a small boy crouched before a cold hearth”. This mythic retelling of the Winter Gift Giver’s life before he grew up and hit the North Pole didn’t live up to it’s opening, but I think that younger children will appreciate this as bed-time reading next December.
Neil Gaiman’s newest is The Graveyard Book. The first line goes beyond a delicious shiver – “There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife” – but the story isn’t as gruesome as you might guess from that sentence. Well, yes, the book opens with a murder, and Nobody Owens is being raised in a cemetery, and there are ghouls (and a slithery being called The Sleer). But for all that, it’s not hideously gruesome, and it’s geared toward mid-grade kids. At least mid-grade kids with a taste for hanging out with dead people.
And, speaking of dead people, I’ll end with another opening, this one from Hogfather, one of my favorite books by my favorite author, Terry Pratchett. Death himself lends a hand when the Discworld’s Winter Gift Giver goes missing, and Pratchett manages (as always) to combine humor, philosophy, and science in one short sentence – “Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”