11. Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (1885)
"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." Twain was arguably best at climbing inside his characters and narrating from within them, at truly becoming them, and the effect is clear in the opening sentence of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's not a lot that needs to be said about it, either: whether you have or haven't read Tom Sawyer, it matters little, because this is a new story and you should expect everything.
10. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, Italo Calvino (1979)
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler." A book by Italo Calvino is a hell of a thing: inviting in tone and style, seemingly simple in structure and layout, but always nearly impervious to analysis. Postmodernist, poststructuralist, postwhateverist, the well-read Calvino made a niche for himself with his novels. The opening sentence of If on a winter's night a traveler affirms the reader's relationship to the author and to the text, and it was in these kinds of questions that Calvino found the most artistic merit. If there is a relationship between reader and writer, what is it? Which of them holds more power over the book? All of Calvino's novels are unique and thought-provoking, but If on a winter's night a traveler is a rabbit hole you'll be happy you went down.
9. Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce (1939)
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commidus vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." €what? This seems to be the typical response to the first sentence of James Joyce's famously impenetrable novel Finnegan's Wake, and indeed to the book as a whole. Highly experimental, the book is without a doubt one of the most difficult novels in the English language and probably any language, a work of "comic prose" that for the most part goes miles above heads everywhere. But a certain effect is achieved with this first line, picking up mid-sentence and carrying the reader along at a suddenly breakneck speed. Even without an understanding of what "Eve and Adam's" refers to, or what "commidus vicus" means, or where "Howth Castle and Environs" might be, there is still an undeniable movement from one to the next, and for that sentence at least we are along for the ride. The book ends in as strange a fashion as it begins, with a sentence running along until it is suddenly struck off, and one could imagine that the end connect back to the beginning, recirculating, keeping the motion accelerating as it goes for another pass. As if we could even get through it once.