"It was love at first sight." I find it remarkable - and maybe it's not even true - that only one book starts with this line. Regardless, the most famous one is likely Joseph Heller's Catch-22, an uproarious war farce with a motley crew of soldiers who don't know quite what they're fighting for. Yossarian, the hero, mostly just wants to go home - maybe unseen forces of evil conspire to keep him in the war zone, or maybe he's just got rotten luck. Is the first line childishly simple? Yes. Cliche? You bet. But all of Catch-22 is built around empty language and amusingly meaningless words, and never has something as grand as "love at first sight" meant so little.
28. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)
"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." In typical Hemingway fashion, the opening line of The Old Man and the Sea gives you everything you need. And it's not just the information that you need - it's the salt of the ocean, the unlucky hours spent trying in vain for a fish, the floating alone in that empty skiff, in that empty gulf. There's a certain magic that Hemingway had that few others did. I can write the words "He was an old man" and get you to believe it sure enough, but Hemingway somehow made you to feel every passed year.
27. The Adventures Of Augie March, Saul Bellow (1953)
"I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." An electric slang lives in these opening words from Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The titular Augie introduces himself not by his name but by his country, by his city, and most of all by his language. The dialogue and the prose work together to form a rhythm throughout all of Bellow's novels, but perhaps never so organically as in Augie March. You learn a lot about Augie in the opening sentence, and the rest of the book ain't bad either.
"He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish." In typical Hemingway fashion, the opening line of The Old Man and the Sea gives you everything you need. And it's not just the information that you need - it's the salt of the ocean, the unlucky hours spent trying in vain for a fish, the floating alone in that empty skiff, in that empty gulf. There's a certain magic that Hemingway had that few others did. I can write the words "He was an old man" and get you to believe it sure enough, but Hemingway somehow made you to feel every passed year.
"I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." An electric slang lives in these opening words from Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. The titular Augie introduces himself not by his name but by his country, by his city, and most of all by his language. The dialogue and the prose work together to form a rhythm throughout all of Bellow's novels, but perhaps never so organically as in Augie March. You learn a lot about Augie in the opening sentence, and the rest of the book ain't bad either.