First Lines

"When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.  When it healed, and Jem's fears of never being able to play were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury..."
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

It has been more than 20 years since I first read Harper Lee's classic novel, and I just picked it up last week to revisit it for our store reading group.  I had forgotten why I loved it the first time, and just reading the first couple of lines just warmed  me with Lee's use of words.  They make me curious about how he broke his arm, and immediately draw me into the story.  Yes, I'm very happy to be reading this again.

Pamela

First Lines

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up.

 -Flannery O' Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

Oh, Flannery, your first sentence says it all! A bunch of weird religion and weird death is surely coming in the following pages.

First Lines

This book was a big favorite of mine (Ben) in 8th grade, and still a great, goofy read...

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

First Lines

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. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)

First Lines

I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city- and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. - Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

For those of you who haven't read it, Augie March is a great book- some say Bellow's best- and it's full of rollicking energy and a sense of possibility infuses the language. It paints a memorable picture of Chicago, and even wanders down to Mexico, but the real wonder of the book is the protagonist, Augie. I highly recommend it.

-Ben

First Lines

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. - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

First Lines

Some days, here on the Grass Roots blog, we'll put up the first sentence of novels and stories we like. First lines are great fun: good ones, like "Call me Ishmael" stick with you and sometimes gain a life all of their own in popular culture. Here's another great, famous one to kick us off:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)