The Librarian Next Door

Now that we’ve started a new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings. Beginnings are great in many ways because they’re filled with possibilities. Anything can happen at the beginning and this is especially true with books.

A really good beginning to a book will hook you right away and compel you to keep reading. What’s more, a great book beginning will make you think that absolutely anything can happen in the following pages, even if you’ve already read the book and know how it ends. One of the things I love about Jane Austen, for example, is that I can start reading Pride and Prejudice for the 100th time and still worry that Lizzie and Darcy may not end up together because Austen’s beginning so thoroughly convinces me of their mutual dislike.

Beginnings also get your own creative juices flowing. A great book beginning will stimulate your imagination and let you think of the thousands of possible journeys the characters might take. It’s almost like a “choose-your-own-adventure” story inside your head.

Here are my favorite first book lines:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen — “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon — “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.”

3. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens — “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling — “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

5. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

So bookworks, what are your favorite first lines? What beginnings do you like best?