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

[lnr]

As soon as I read your paragraph about good-books-with-boring-first-lines my mind had immediately skipped ahead to The Crow Road. Which admittedly I do also like as a book.

I can't think of any more really obviously first lines - but I'm sure there are others I would recognise if I saw them. I do rather like that Neuromancer one.

(On that quiz I got a rather miraculous 8/10 - I'd say 3 or 4 were ones I recognised, 2 or 3 educated guesses, and 2 complete guesses)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do also like The Crow Road. I only read it quite recently, and found it really funny - which horrified a friend of mine who said wait, what? That book's about death and trauma and turmoil and is really dark, what do you mean you found it funny? Different approaches to life, I guess :)

I got 6/10, which I thought was a bit rubbish - so presumably I had at least 4 uneducated guesses.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I got them all right, though some by informed guesswork more than actually knowing them.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Quite often I managed informed guesswork to narrow it down to two, but then invariably went for the wrong one.

Or on at least one occasion ("of A and B it can't be A because I've read A") I was just plain wrong :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I recently read a book which began:

"Imagine, then, a flat landscape, dark for the moment, but even so conveying to a girl running in the still deeper shadow cast by the wall of the Bibighar Gardens an idea of immensity, of distance, such as years before Miss Crane had been conscious of standing where a lane ended and cultivation began: a different landscape but also in the alluvial plain between the mountains of the north and the plateau of the south."

The second paragraph is a sentence even longer and more convoluted, and the third paragraph begins "This is the story of a rape,..."

I did think at the time that it was enough to put anyone off :)

(Actually, it's quite a good book (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jewel-Crown-Raj-quartet/dp/0099439964).)

[lnr]

I'm with you on this one: It's *full* of humour, and I loved it. Though I will admit to it being a *little* dark. The TV adaptation was pretty good too, in its own way.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

10/10 mostly by good guessing through context and tone.

The thing is I don't remember the first line, I just remember how the narrator speaks.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, in general I wouldn't expect to remember the first line of a book I'd read. Unless it had been made to stick for some reason - such as repeatedly featuring in quizzes - or because I really liked it.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I got 9/10 on that quiz, only two of which were guesses.

I may have, err, read quite a lot of books.

My favourite really bad opening is Les Miserables. Not only is the first line not an attention-getter, but the first forty pages are about a character who is vitally important for one scene, and then never seen again.

Thing is, though, I don't tend to remember first lines. I'm quite happy to drift through paragraphs, even pages of slow build-up and introduction, as long as I'm comfortable with the writing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

In general, by the time I've got as far as reading the first line, I reckon I'm pretty committed to reading a book and will give it a whirl... but I have seen plenty of people in bookshops pick up a book, read the first paragraph or so, and then either put it back or decide to buy it.

I dont mind long, slow build-ups or long, slow sentences - what I object to (particularly in an opening paragraph) are the sorts of sentences where you have to go back and re-read to get the sense of them. This might be because they're just badly written, or because they have So Many Clauses you lose track and have to match the commans like brackets, or because they just ramble on... Actually, I guess any sentence you have to decode is probably badly written :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I do like to make obvious grammatical mistakes when writing about bad writing, by the way.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh, and apparently spelling mistakes, too. Should say "commas", not "commans".

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen -- 1984.

One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: -- it was the black kitten's fault entirely. -- Through the Looking Glass (And What Alice Found There).

I got 10/10, mainly by judicious guessing.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

There's a board game, the name of which I can't remember, but basically on each round, everyone has to make up the first or last line of a specific book, and then you have to guess which one is the correct one; sort of like Call My Bluff but with fist/last lines. Good game!

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Obviously. There is a Law that must not be braken.

When I'm in bookshops I do occasionally pick a book up and read the first paragraph. That happens when the blurb on the back gives me a bit of a Marmite (love it or hate it) feeling. Reading one or two paragraphs normally tells me enough about the author's prose style, characterisation and descriptive powers to make the call as to which it'll be.

But that doesn't take an arresting first line; in fact, arranging your introductory paragraphs so as to ensure an arresting first line may hinder your chances with me.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Yes, me too. A lot of them could be deduced by things like dates.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think I've played that (though I can't think where).

I found the trick to writing a first line which other people will guess correct is to include some salient, memorable detail from the book in it, e.g. referring to one of the main characters by name. Which not that many real first lines actually do :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I know it as a card game: Ex Libris.

And having played it rather a lot at uni, I'm (apparently) a dreadful person to play it with. :)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My favourite opening line may well appear in the quiz so I'll go and do it before I come back to post...

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

That's the one!

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

Yes, that can help, as an getting a feel for the writer's voice; Chandler and Hemingway use short sentences or sentence fragments (I scored a perfect round on a Chandler one with a sentence fragment about the fifth of rye in the bottom drawer, IIRC), Dickens rambles on, Hardy talks at length about the scenery...

[venta.livejournal.com]

On which note... I've noticed of late that I've completely stopped reading back-cover blurbs. Which led to a weird conversation with one of my colleagues recently, who had read the blurb for a book I was half-way through. The blurb said something like "after the death of his mother, X finds love with Y"... yet at half-way through the mother had only just died, rather unexpectedly, and X had barely met Y, so I was at serious risk of spoilers.

(And indeed I challenge whether it could ever be said he fell in love with her, but that's a separate gripe.)

I didn't really decide to stop reading them, it just seems I have. Which is fortunate, because I've quite often enjoyed books and then discovered a blurb which would pretty much have prevented me from ever starting them. Either way, they shouldn't have major spoilers in them!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes!

Although I have noted that despite being able to recognise an American writer in very short order (always useful when spotting first lines), I am completely hopeless at impersonating any of them :)

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Yes, I entirely agree with you on spoilers-in-blurbs. Why do people do that? It removes half the surprise from the plot!

So... if you don't read blurbs, how do you pick books?

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

10/10. And yes, my favourite one does appear in there.

Some others that I like:
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.

and one which is not worth guessing(!): You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.