10 Favorite Novel Openings
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- Опубликовано: 27 июл 2024
- Buy me a coffee: ko-fi.com/leafbyleaf
Here are ten of my favorite opening lines.
Rules:
1. Novels only.
2. No classics.
3. Cannot appear on my "famous first lines" coffee mug.
4. Must be within the first page.
What are some of your favorite opening lines in novels?
Enjoyed sampling those sentences. I really like the openings from The Lost Scrapbook, The Runaway Soul, Purple America, Operation Wandering Soul, My Name is Red, The Impossibly, and Rabbit, Run
Once I get home from the drudgeries of the office, I will indulge in your selections!
The Runaway Soul is a great choice. The opening was pretty much the only good thing about it's 800 pages, in my opinion.
"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton." - Samuel Beckett, "Murphy"
Saint Beckett is always a treat!
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Ahhhh, yes! Good one!
Wow. Fantastic. That's Dan Brown right? Oh I just checked. My nose isn't bleeding. It's not Dan Brown.
There are so many lines in All the Pretty Horses that stayed with me. At one point, John leaping backwards to dodge knife slashes in the prison yard is described as looking like a man 'refereeing his own bloodletting'. Nothing beats Blood Meridian, but still, it's an underrated book I feel.
Totally agree! All the Pretty Horses is one of my favorites! It mesmerized me when I first read it!
I also wanted to write like Henry Miller for a long time. "I have no money, no resources,, no hopes. I'm the happiest man alive." What a writer!
Whenever I step into a Miller piece it is like a revelation.
@@LeafbyLeaf The first page of Tropic of Cancer is pure magic too.
A screaming comes across the sky. - Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon.
Hear! Hear!
I love these! A few of yours are actually are my favorites as well.
One that has always stuck with me is from Toni Morrison's Paradise:
"They shoot the white girl first, but the rest they can take their time. No need to hurry out here."
I remember reading that in the Union Square Barnes and Nobles in NYC and couldn't put the book down. Almost up to 100 pages later I bought the book and finished it in the park across the street later that very afternoon.
Morrison is, of course, one of the greats!
I love, love, love moments like these in the life of a reader--thanks for sharing it with me!
@@LeafbyLeaf No problem! That's for sharing your channel with us all.
terra nostra does have a good opening. Never read it but wow
Latin American writers seem to have a special gift.
The best so far I've read is from "If This Is A Man" from Primo Levi:
"You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find warm food
And friendly faces when you return home.
Consider if this is a man
Who works in mud,
Who knows no peace,
Who fights for a crust of bread,
Who dies by a yes or no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair, without name,
Without the strength to remember,
Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Like a frog in winter.
Never forget that this has happened.
Remember these words.
Engrave them in your hearts,
When at home or in the street,
When lying down, when getting up.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your houses be destroyed,
May illness strike you down,
May your offspring turn their faces from you."
I feel ashamed that I’ve not read Levi yet. Almost bought the hardcover of his complete works recently. Thanks for sharing this delicious excerpt!
The first chapter of Chuch Palahniuk's *Survivor* made me run out to my mom's car so I could ask her for a couple extra bucks to get the book. Dude's got opening lines down to a science.
Nice! That was actually my first Palahniuk. I remember reading it by the pool one Saturday and was so engrossed in it I never even got in the water!
love that McCarthy line. there's a similar line in Mason & Dixon, about a candleflame flickering with the vehemence of the title characters' speech. lovely stuff. cheers on the channel by the way, really glad to have discovered it.
I plan to finally read M & D this year! Thanks for checking out the channel. Welcome!
Thanks. Got a book to read today.
What a great day!
“It was today - rather yesterday I think - that he told me it was important not to accept life as a brutal approximation.” Dalva, Jim Harrison.
Nice one!
Zora Neale Hurston! One of my favorite writers! I love this one. My personal favorite is Dust Tracks on a Road.
She's a treasure, indeed!
“Somebody must have slandered Joseph K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.”, Franz Kafka, "The Trial".
👏👏👏
For some reason Camus' The Stranger always struck me as a fake book. Also, can't be denied, quite a bit was borrowed from James M. Cain's masterful The Postman Always Rings Twice. My humble take on it. Absolutely agree with you, though, the opening of Zora's book is shockingly awesome (as are some of the others).
Always: "All of this happened, more or less"- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
"It was the day my grandmother exploded." - The Crow Road by Iain Banks.
😮🔥😜
@@LeafbyLeaf Yeah, that one is pretty hard to top as an enticement to read further. Literally starts with a bang!
Favorites come from Lolita, Neuromancer, Notes from Underground, Blood Meridian, and L’étranger.
The haunting of hill house. Definitely one of the best breathtaking openings ever
Great selection! I can't tell you how happy I was to see your French copy of L'étranger. Camus is one of my favourite authors of the 20th century 👍
:):):) Quelle chance !
@@LeafbyLeaf N'est-ce pas? 😊
"In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be so precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark Bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in." Charles Dickens, 'Our Mutual Friend'
And "Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that." - Gene Wolfe, 'Litany of the Long Sun'
Bravo!
The first sentence that always comes to my mind is; "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King. Oh and one that I wrote years ago, "Now that I'm dead, I find most of my questions have been answered."
If I recall correctly from that SK series, that would be both the opening and closing sentence ;)
Your sentence puts me in the mind of the character Bras Cubas from Machado de Assis!
I like seeing If on a Winters Night in the background next to Barth. That's one of my favorite books, along with Carpenters Gothic and Pale Fire.
Calvino? Barth? Gaddis? Nabokov? You are I are definitely kindred spirits! Glad you found my channel.
@@LeafbyLeaf same here dude!
"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased." - Notes from the Underground.
Bravo!
That Fuentes opening is very good.
Yes, I’m quite fond of it myself!
I 100% agree with Terra Nostra. The first time I read its first paragraph, I was so overwhelmed with this strange warm feeling. It's so packed, yet so beautiful and simple. No word is unintentional, no word is missing. It's just as perfect as an opening can get.
Kinda late to the party, but here are my favorites, hehe:
-“A SCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”, Gravity's Rainbow
-“MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”. One Hundred Years of Solitude. This one hits specially hard in the original Spanish.
-“It was a pleasure to burn”, Fahrenheit 451
-“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.”
Hear, hear! Love all your favorites!
All the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born.
Hour of the star - Clarice Lispector
She’s such a treasure!
I loved the Fuentes quote, and have that opening line at the top of my list. I also like Laszlo Krasznahorkai's first line of Satantango: "One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells."
Très bon français! J'adore votre chaîne, j'ai découvert beaucoup de choses et pour ça, merci beaucoup 😊
Merci beaucoup et bienvenu à mon chaîne ! J’espère que vous avez aimer les choses !
Haha i love that last one👌🏾
It’s perfect!
Tuning my piano
Love it!
I fucking love Ducornet. I need to read more of her work.
Some of my favorites: "Many years ago there lived a man called Laurids Madsen, who went up to Heaven and came down again, thanks to his boots.' - We, The Drowned
"To describe Greece I would share with you a tomato on the sandy beaches of Skopellos, open a sea-urchin with my pen-knife and serve you the scarlet eggs inside while the salt stretches the skin on our backs." - A Crowded Heart
"'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die..." - The Satanic Verses
"Everybody wants to own the end of the world." - Zero K
And as a bonus here is part of the opening to my work-in-progress, an encyclopedic/maximalist novel titled Morphological Echoes: "When the moon gave birth it was in the manner of gray quicksand expelling, rather than swallowing, a baby boy. He coughed up chalky clouds that dispersed into sunlit particles, then balled his fists and brushed the cement dust from his eyes. Cradled in a crater, he cried without sound, uvula vibrating slowly in an oral void."
I, too, am a huge Ducornet fan!
Thanks for sharing these tasty selections!
As for your book-I should like a copy as soon as possible. Are you publishing with RBB?
@@LeafbyLeaf Thanks, Chris! The work-in-progress will need a few more years yet to be completed. It's hard to project word counts but it will be around 250k words or so. For that novel I'm going to aim for a bigger press and search out an agent (a futile task admittedly, but I should at least try), and if no one bites then I will submit to the smaller presses.
@@TheCollidescopePodcast Ah, OK. So there's no exclusivity with RBB? (I'm considering my little novel for them.)
@@LeafbyLeaf They're publishing my debut novel but there is no exclusivity for what I've since been working on. I hope RBB accepts your work. It would be nice to be press-mates!
Votre français est excellent! Merci pour toutes ces magnifiques phrases!
Merci mille fois ! Bienvenue à mon channel.
C'est une très belle découverte que j'ai fait aujourd'hui!
Vous êtes très gentil !
The intro to The Stranger is on that mug! Or at least it's on my version of the mug (although not in the original French).
:):):)
"I was strong and he was not, so it was me went to war to defend the Republic. I stepped across the border out of Indiana into Ohio..." Neverhome by Laird Hunt. This book was recommended to me from a neighbor and I loved it! It's about a woman who disguises herself as a man and fights in the Civil War.
Also, I love your channel! I just discovered it. Can't wait for more videos -- your lit criticism video was the first one I watched, and I agree. Mark Edumdson's Why Read? is amazing! One of my favorites books on the reading life. :)
Hey! I haven’t heard of that one. Thanks for putting it on my radar.
Thanks for checking out the channel. Glad you’re enjoying it. Woohoo for Edmundson!
Late to the party. My choice is the opening paragraphs of Naipaul's A Bend in the River. They have haunted me for over 40 years.
The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
Nazruddin, who had sold me the shop cheap, didn't think I would have it easy when I took over. The country, like others in Africa, had had its troubles after independence. The town in the interior, at the bend in the great river, had almost ceased to exist; and Nazruddin said I would have to start from the beginning.
I drove up from the coast in my Peugeot. That isn't the kind of drive you can do nowadays in Africa - from the east coast right through to the center. Too many of the places on the way have closed down or are full of blood.
I just picked up the Everyman's hardcover of this at the bookstore over Christmas break!
I know this is an old video but the few that stick out to me are The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, that brief moment of reverence for nature where everything scales up from seed to sentient being, and the next chapter introduces us to our God, taxes. Kind of in an opposite manner, John WIlliams' Stoner just more or less tells you what providence has in store for Stoner. His legacy is laid down, but of course the story of his life is fascinating.
That’s the beauty of talking about books: the video might be old, but the topic never will be! Great choices.
“They threw me off the hay truck about noon.” -The Postman Always Rings Twice
Love it!
To me, Bill Bryson has some of the best opening lines.
The Lost Continent: I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.
Neither Here Nor There: In winter, Hammerfest is a 34 hour ride by bus from Oslo, though why anyone would want to go there in winter is a question worth considering.
The Road to Little Dribbling: One of the things that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I don't think I could have managed in my younger, more alert years.
Indeed, these are great!
Damn, that line from Albert Camus gives me chills
Great video I am enticed to make the same one!
Thanks! Please let me know as soon as it's up!
"This is not for you."
I can’t think of ten off the top of my head, as it will take a lot of thought. But the opening line of The Floating Opera reminded me of the brilliant opening line of Tristram Shandy.
“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 consider’d 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.”
It only gets better as Tristram proceeds to speak of the moment of his conception.
Great pick! Most of my favorite modern novels have one leg in Sterne and the other in Rabelais.
@@LeafbyLeaf
I still haven’t read any Rabelais, however, just last week I got a really nice Franklin Library edition of Gargantua and Pantagruel at a used bookstore. I’m excited to read it soon.
“Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm-lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting seamarks that might return them to the order of the world.” Shadow Country, Peter Mathiessen
👏👏👏
"Mine has been a life of much shame." - No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai.
Another great opening line by Osamu Dazai is: "Last year nothing happened. The year before that nothing happened. And the year before that nothing happened".
I feel like I'm the only person in the world who has yet to read Dazai!
@@LeafbyLeaf I really can't recommend No Longer Human enough, though as it was his last novel and somewhat of a memoir, I think a good starting point is his short stories. His work was extremely formative to me, both as a reader and as a person. I read no longer human during a dark time of my life, though I'm happy to say that his books, and many others, have led me to a better place.
I love hearing about books that have personally helped people. Thank you.
"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden pond, in concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands alone. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. "
❤️❤️❤️
Not technically a novel. It was a Memoir.
THE SECRET HISTORY!!!!!
Have you read The Little Friend and The Goldfinch too? If you did, which one is your most favourite and least?
Yep. I liked Goldfinch the most and Friend the least. Looking forward to whatever she will do next!
I tried reading Terra Nostra a few years ago. That is a tough book, but holy cow, that opening sentence is one of the most beautiful that I've ever read. An acquaintance of mine who teaches literature in a small university re-assured me in a way by telling me that her PhD thesis was about Terra Nostra and that she still isn't sure to fully understand it, so I felt a little less dumb.
Hahaha! I love that! It is sublime reading for sure. Would be a great candidate for a stand-alone video on here...
Don't know if you've ever done it, but if not, 10 favorite endings would be interesting; The Dead, Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Ulysses might all be contenders
That’s a great suggestion-and great contenders indeed! I’ll say yes say yes I said yes
@@LeafbyLeaf It's a rare effort when someone to replies to every comment, especially those on older videos, and even more scarce is the thoughtful reply. You and your channel are both dazzling stand-outs among a common fashion of dreary detachment
I’m so appreciative of everyone out here who takes time to watch my videos and comment. It’s a pleasure to have this dialogue. Happy holidays!
@@LeafbyLeaf Absolutely. Happy holidays!
mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.
Aside from all the ones you mentioned (which convinced me to go out and find all of them, btw).
Some favourites of mine:
"It was a pleasure of burn" - Farenheit 451. I dont like the book, but this, as an opening sentence, is brilliant.
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974" - Middlesex. I've literally, literally, no idea what this book is about. But fuck me if that's not an amazing opening.
"To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth" - The Grapes of Wrath. From the very opening line, Steinback establishes the very nature, the entire tone of his whole novel. Nature, the blistered, dust strewn, apocalyptic landscape of Dust Bowl rural America, all conveyed with the brutality and horror he can muster. The landscape is a character for Steinback, a gothic nightmare as much, if not more, developed than the characters. Brilliant.
"For three days Dr. Alimantando had followed the greenperson across the desert. Beckoned by a finger made from articulated runner beans, he had sailed over the desert of red grit, the desert of red stone, and the desert of red sand and in pursuit of it. And each night, as he sat by his fire built from scraps of mummified wood, writing in his journals, the moonring would rise, and it would draw the greenperson out of the deep places of the desert" - Desolation Road, Ian McDonald
"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed." - Ulysses
"When Red wins, she stands alone. Blood slicks her hair. She breathes out steam in the last night of this dying world." - This is How You Loose the Time War
"There was a low mist. You could see the glare of headlamps reflected on the high voltage cables beside the road" - Life and Fate
"The main building of the old resort hotel, half hidden from view behind a screen of old poplars and cypresses, was an oppressive, gray structure which seemed to have turned its back to the sea at the bidding of some crazed fairy-tale conjurer." - The Life of Insects, Victor Pelevin
"I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles." Inverted World, Christopher Priest
"Observe now your own history as it appears to the Last Men" - Last and First Men, Olaf Stapleton
"From this height, the forest looked like dappled, fluffy foam; like a gigantic, world-encompassing porous sponge; like an animal that had overgrown with coarse moss. Like a shapeless mask, hiding a face no one had ever seen" - the Snail on the Slope, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
"The day was flat. That morning his mind had abandoned him and left his body wandering down below. The empty body went listlessly through its routine, pale and vacant-eyed under the fluorescent strip lights, as his soul floated above the usles and throught only of tommorow. Tommorow was something to look forward to." - Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart
"Whether Picinic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dear, it hardly seems important" - Picnic at Hanging Rock. Its not technically the first line, it comes just before it on the opposite page. But god damn does ever it set you up for just disqueitingly weird and disturbing this novel is.
Thanks so much for sharing these excellent entries (and the highly amusing commentary)!
"The world is everything that is the case."
Nice! Love Wittgenstein!
A great line, even if Wittgenstein ultimately threw away that ladder after climbing it.
Once you go fact, you can’t go back.
Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex: I am Zenzontli, Keeper of the House of Darkness of the Aztex and I am getting fucked in the head and I think I like it.
At this point I’m ready to ask a favor of you: Please give me your top book recommendations. Email if you want. Or share here to edify others.
@@LeafbyLeaf That's pretty flattering. In no particular order and as rapidly as possible:
1. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel; 2. Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex; 3. Antonio Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino; 4. The Irish guys: Beckett, O'Brien, Joyce; 5. Alvaro Mutis, all the Maqroll novellas; 6. Eliot, Middlemarch; 7. Melville, Moby Dick; 8. the long Kafkas, particularly The Castle; 9.Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope; 10...Suttree, Cormac McCarthy or A Brief Life, Onetti, or Fuentes' The Death of Artemio Cruz; 100 Years of Solitude; or Conversation in the Cathedral, Vargas Llosa; Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night; Gunther Grass, Tin Drum...woops: The Recognitions, Gaddis, for sure, right up there with Mutis...you see how it goes...Thanks for asking...Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring...Dobrica Čosic's 4 volume WWI novel ('the Serbian War and Peace'); Brothers Karamazov; Arlt, The Seven Madmen/The Flamethrowers...coffee
You see how it goes: Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim; half of Vonnegut's novels; Pavić's Dictionary of the Khazars; Djilas' Wartime; RK Narayan, half his novels; several others came to me--I think a list of ten has to include at least 30 to account for tastes....The Arabian Nights...Braudel Mediterranean because like Djilas' a little non-fiction is necessary for a fiction list...Daša Drndić's Trieste...STOP
MUSIL! Man Without Qualities!
@@rickharsch8797 (Love the coffee break!) So glad to see Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov on your list (those are two of my favorites and your validation goes a long way for me). From this list we are about 50:50 in terms of books we've both read. I really need to branch out more from my den of US, Canadian, and Western European lit (this is why I recently picked up an updated set of the Norton Anthology of World Lit). I've never read Raja Rao, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Alvaro Mutis, Donoso, Pavić, Djilas, RK Narayan, or Daša Drndić. You've mentioned Dobrica Čosic's "Serbian War and Peace" before and from my cursory glances online it looks like it will take a little more effort and money to obtain. Arlt you told me about the other day and I see I can order from RBB. Thanks for sharing this list. One of my greatest joys is getting a peek into a writer's favorite books.
I don't speak French so I'm wondering if Camus' original work is done in a sophisticated, flowerly style or considered more straightforward? The Vintage publication/Stuart Gilbert translation was remarkably tight and sharp-no wasted words. Does this mirror Camus' original writing?
I would definitely call it more minimalist, yes.
@@LeafbyLeaf Nice
Not from innocence nor from Asia did mane generate...
Hello there! From what is this?
@@LeafbyLeaf "African Genesis" by Robert Ardrey. The true opening, which I just looked up, is actually far more stirring. "Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born." Forgive me; it has been some time since I read it. I highly recommend this, but trigger warning: terrible racism.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Addy C! I've never heard of this before, but the more I'm reading about this author and his Nature of Man series, the more interested I am. I've added it to my list of subscriber recommendations, so, once I read it, I will let you know. I love discovering new books!
@@LeafbyLeaf I just recently discovered BookTube... five days ago. I feel like the worst English Major ever, but that's what happens when you work 37+ hours a week while going to class full time. I love your more scholarly approach to BookTubing. The big BookTubers are fun and nerdy (like me!) but it's always amazing to encounter true literature geeks, not just your everyday book nerd! I look forward to hearing from you when you read it. Ardrey also wrote a play about The Alamo, and, as a Texan, I am naturally quite fond of the man... just not his racism.
Don’t be too hard on yourself-I would expect book lovers to be too busy reading to stay up on things like BookTube! 😜
Thanks for your kind words about my channel in light of the big ones. I’ve noticed that they tend to gravitate to books I have a hard time praising. But that it of course totally cool-there’s a place for everyone around here!
Thanks again for checking out the channel and sharing some feedback.
Have you heard of Allen Wier’s book TEHANO?