20. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkein (1937)
"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." You'd be hard-pressed these days to find someone who doesn't know what a hobbit is, considering Peter Jackson's assault on the film world with five films set in Middle-Earth and a sixth on the way. But the subject of the first sentence of J.R.R. Tolkein's novel The Hobbit still manages to retain its mystery, despite an association with the likes of Elijah Wood and Martin Freeman. Tolkein's straightforward prose is on display here, too, and this unadorned style lent much to the Middle-Earth books as a whole - despite an impossibly expansive world full of new species and languages, Tolkein's writing served to ground readers along the way.
19. Murphy, Samuel Beckett (1938)
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new." Samuel Beckett certainly never claimed to instill his readers with very much optimism. Waiting for Godot may have made Beckett's wandering, despairing characterizations famous, but even Vladimir and Estragon would admit that the first line from his earlier novel Murphy hits the fatalist nail on the head. Even the sun doesn't have a choice here, nevermind us little people scrambling around beneath it. The title character does indeed withdraw himself from life, depriving himself from interactions sensory, interpersonal, human. With an uppity first sentence like that I can hardly blame him.
18. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne (1767)
"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; - that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: - Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, - I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me." I'll leave out any long-winded explanation of why the opening sentence from Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy makes the cut. Suffice it to say that this is one of the best stories ever told, and it would also be the best you'd ever heard if you could only get past the telling part.