Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Best first lines

I've just been doing some prep work for the writing class that I'm teaching this semester and thought I'd share it with you:

The 100 Best First Lines from Novels

Unless I overlooked it on the list somewhere, my favorite seems to be missing:
“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.” In John Irvings's A Prayer for Owen Meany.

But what strikes me most about the list is not how few of these books that I have read but how few I have even heard of. Sure, most of the authors are familiar but I probably haven't read a third of these. I feel so uncultured!

1 comment:

Gretchen Magruder said...

Could I get the list? Mom