This book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory...

[venta]

This lunchtime, I was amusing myself with the first-lines-from-books quiz that undyingking twittered about: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/03/book-quiz-classic-first-lines/

I was doing rather poorly on it at first, partly because it featured first lines from books I hadn't read, but mostly because it was featuring first lines from books which don't appear in quizzes of first lines from books.

By the end, the quiz had caught up with my expectations and asked me about "Call me Ishmael" and It is a truth universally acknowledged....

Ordinarily I reckon there are actually very few books which turn up in such quizzes. Besides those mentioned above there are the usual suspects: 1984, A Tale of Two Cities, The Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, The Da Vinci Code. A frequent guest in the identity parade is “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die.”, which I have slowly learned is the opening of The Satanic Verses.

Oddly, you never seem to get the opening line from The Go-Between which, while it's not a hugely popular book, has probably been read (or, rather, finished :) by more people than Salman Rushdie's epic. It begins with the beautiful phrase The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Which is another problem I encountered with the quiz linked above: some of the opening lines it featured seemed... well, actually not very interesting. A good book can have a not-especially-blinding first line. Authors of a certain era didn't seem to have grasped the idea of grabbing attention in the opening paragraph. The first line a reader sees doesn't have to be snappy (see A Tale of Two Cities for a highly-memorable, attention-grabbing opener which rambles on for about three pages) but many books from a century ago just seem to drift in, trudging interminably through clauses to make no very great point at all.

There are, of course, also books which appear to have been written expressly in the hopes they will wind up in such quizzes. Oy, The Crow Road, I'm looking at you. It was the day my grandmother exploded., indeed.

Some opening lines tell you enough about the story that you can guess. Do you know the openinling to The Wizard of Oz? No?
Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer's wife.
You'd have worked it out, right?

My personal favourite opening line is, I think, one which features occasionally in quizzes: William Gibson's Neuromancer. The sky above the port was the colour of a television tuned to a dead channel; a metaphor that has now been comprehensively stuffed by the likes of Sky and their lurid-blue "no signal" pages.

Do you have a favourite memorable opening line? For which books that don't usually feature in quizzes can you instantly recall the beginning? (Feel free to post without attribution for the rest of us to guess, if you wish.)

Comments

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

"A landmine blew my leg off. I fell down because I had to."

(Dave Langford's The Space Eater)

10/10 for me, I thought them easy to guess by context

[venta.livejournal.com]

I have been feeling rather bewildered that everyone thinks them so easy to guess... it turns out that if you visit the page on a real browser (rather than on my smartphone's browser) it shows you the whole first sentence rather than a sentence truncated in an arbitrary place.

That probably would have made it easier.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's not that everyone found them easy to guess, but that it's those who found them easy to guess are more likely to comment. I didn't find them easy to guess, and wouldn't have commented on the matter if I hadn't wanted to reply to this.