As any fule no, the best ever first line for a book is Iain Banks’ The Crow Road ((“It was the day my grandmother exploded.”)) , and nothing really comes close to that. Having said that, I started reading Robert Rankin’s latest book, Necrophenia, yesterday and it does start well:
It was about a week after I’d almost saved mankind
Tags: Books
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I still love the first line from Neuromancer – pity the rest of the book didn’t live up to it but still it paved the way for the whole Cyberpunk genre.
Can’t really remember much about it, certainly not the first line. Can’t remember not enjoying it though IYSWIM
my favourite opening line:
I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and the other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago, known to my friends and relatives and associates as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Claudius”, or Claudius the Stammerer”, or Clau-Clau-Claudius”, or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, am now about to write this strange history of my life….
Here’s two from me:
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, “Be My Baby” on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.” – American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano BuendÃa was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. ” One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I actually do better with best final lines from books –
“One bird said to Billy Pilgrim – ‘Poo-tee-weet?’ ” – Slaughterhouse 5
“For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.” – 2001
Surprised nobody mentioned 1984 – although I reckon that doesn’t have anything like the impact it would have had at the time because thirteen o’clock is perfectly natural concept to us now.
Given that 1984 is supposedly the book that most people lie about having read, I’m not all that surprised.
What about
“It was a dark and stormy night”? 🙂