17. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
"All this happened, more or less." Vonnegut's casual style permeates nearly every sentence he writes, but perhaps none more so than the indelible opener of Slaughterhouse-Five. And such is Billy Pilgrim's weird and epic journey: absurd and yet never far away from a deathly seriousness, unstuck in time and yet rooted firmly in the minute present. In the very first sentence we have something which is undeniably true before the comma, and then we see it questioned by the time the period rolls around. It's hard not to like Vonnegut's style, hard not to feel as if you're in a pub with the guy and he's telling you the story over a pint.
16. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1850)
"Whether I should turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." David Copperfield is one of the most heartfelt and complete characters ever created by Charles Dickens, probably because there are elements to the story that are heavily autobiographical. Many characters are based on real-life figures - Micawber, drawn above, is based on Charles' father John - but none are felt with such clarity as young David. With this in mind, the opening sentence of the novel takes on a special significance. Despite the vast differences in character throughout the novel, despite the gulfs between personalities and ideologies in fiction and in life, anyone can hope to be the hero of his or her own life. There is both an intimation of youth and a nostalgia of senectitude at work here, and Dickens proves with a single sentence that his place as master novelist is rightfully owned.
15. Couples, John Updike (1968)
"'What do you make of the new couple?'" Couples probably isn't John Updike's most popular book, and it probably isn't his best - both of those distinctions may very well belong to his earlier novel Rabbit, Run. But it's still a great book, and the opening line invites us into a dog-eat-dog world of, well, couples. The first line starts a conversation about the newest spousal pair on the block, but even without knowing what follows, you can guess the speakers are themselves a couple. This is the kind of question only exchanged inside of a pair, and it veils what it's really asking: "What do you make of the new couple as compared to us?"