The first lines club

The 100 Best First Lines From Novels, from the editors of the American Book Review.

There are few surprises in the top 10, which includes:

1.  "Call me Ishmael." (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick)

2.  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)

6.  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina)

8.  "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (George Orwell, 1984)

9.  "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...." (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

But I can't figure out how they came up with some of the rest. Who, for instance, would pick #34: "In a sense, I am Jacob Horner" (John Barth, The End of the Road)? These are much better:

39.  "They shoot the white girl first." (Toni Morrison, Paradise)

51. "Elmer Gantry was drunk." (Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry)

62.  "Once upon a time, there  was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person." (Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups)

64.  "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby)

83.  "'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'" (Katherine Dunn, Geek Love)

Oddly, the list completely omits one classic opening line:

"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." (Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster)

Now that's an opener.

And then there's one of my personal favorites, Florence King's first line for her only serious novel, When Sisterhood Was in Flower:

"Call me Isabel."

Comments

[Rabbit]

While it's actually two sentences, one of the greatest openings is from Billie Holiday's biography "Lady Sings The Blues":

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen, and I was three.

[retreadranger]

Yay, Florence King!

In her autobiographical "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady," she announces the success of her plan to convince a professor to take her virginity with a nod to Charlotte Bronte:

"Reader, I fucked him."