That’s probably my favorite book among books I’ve read in the last five years, and a good part of my enjoyment was due to that style of narration at the beginning.
Books I’m currently reading – Portrait of a Romantic, by Steven Millhauser: Mother of myself, myself I sing: lord of loners, duke of dreams, king of clowns.
Ignorance, by Milan Kundera: “What are you still doing here?”
At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O’Neill: There goes Mr. Mack, cock of the town. [As soon as I’m finished reading this one, I’m going to start all over again. It’s so good.]
Just finished this, on a Doper recommendation (alas, I don’t recall whose) – picked it up in B&N based on the recommendation, but bought it based on the first sentence.
Me, currently:
“In an easy chair of the spacious and handsome library of his town-house sat William, Earl of Mount Severn.”
Hmph, not very beguiling, is it? It’s the first sentence of East Lynne, the scandalous bestseller of the 1860s by Mrs. Henry Ward. I started it mainly because
I had a business trip coming up, and knew I’d have serious airport-and-travel time to kill, so I wanted something I’d be in zero danger of finishing. (And such proved to be the case: eight hours’ worth yesterday – ten, no shit, ten today – for a 600-mile trip to frigging Dayton and back. For a two-hour meeting, of which the first hours was damn close to incomprehensible to me – and the other hour of which was the presentation I made, for which I spent 18 hours of travel. But I digress. As one is apt to do when enmeshed in Victorian novels. Shall I tell you about the nun in the Detroit airport?)
FTR: I did not, in fact, finish the book, so it served its purpose – I’m on page 267 of 636.
“The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.” – All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy.
“Here’s some trivia for you.” - Brainiac by Ken Jennings. His amazing run on Jeopardy! led him to write all about trivia - history, trivia on radio and TV, board games, question construction, the people involved, and of course his own experiences. This one Zyada and I are reading to each other.
“The bus came up over the rise and there was Lyncastle nestling in the dark palm of the mountains like a jewel box with the moon shining on it.” - The Long Wait by Mickey Spillane. Our hero comes into a wide-open town looking for a lost past … and for revenge.
Today, I begin Native Tongue, by Carl Hiaasen, which begins: “On July 16, in the aching torpid heat of the South Florida summer, Terry Whelper stood at the Avis counter at Miami International Airport and rented a bright red Chrysler LeBaron convertible.”
I’d like to mention, too, that my all-time favorite opening lines in a book come from The Stranger, by Albert Camus: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” (Yes, I know that’s TWO sentences: I’m cheating a bit.)
“On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Belotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.”
“Savage Run” by C. J. Box, a series featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Picket.
“I get the willies when I see closed doors.” – Joseph Heller, Something Happened. I’m sadly disappointed so far. I read Catch-22, which I think is some of the most brillant writing of the past century, and Good as Gold, which at the very least was very entertaining. But this right now…leaves me cold.
“Nobody could sleep.” – Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, which is part of my ongoing endeavour to read as much war fiction as I can to see if there’s something that could be made into a master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation or something like that.
“Someone turned on the radio in the wheelhouse.” – Gore Vidal, Williwaw, ditto.
I need more books, though. My stack of unread classics of literature is still large, but uninviting…
I’m afraid it doesn’t get any better. I loved Catch-22 and gave Heller the benefit of the doubt with Something Happened. I’m afraid that nothing ever happened.
Now my first lines:
“I walked through the clubhouse doors,” from Baseball is a Funny Game by Joe Garraciola.
“My back was pushing against the door, but the doorway was shallow and the yellow glow of the street light accross the street caught me full in the face,” from Homicide Sanitarium by Fredric Brown.
“By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it,” from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson.
The Sot-Weed Factor: “In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fasion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similies stretched to the snapping-point.”
Circuit Analysis: Theory and Practice: “Circuit theory provides the tools and concepts needed to understand and analyze electrical and electronic circuits.”
La Sainte Bible (French): “Au commencement, Dieu crea les cieux et la terre.”
De Nyew Testament (Gullah): “Dis yah de people wa dey write down say been kin ta Jedus Christ, fom way back ta Abraham time.”
Succeed in Business: Vietnam: When the 1990s began, much of the world was so preoccupied with the economic promise of China that it took a while to realize that important changezzzzz… Huh? What? No, I’m just resting my eyes.
"It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.’
I’m on page 454 now and have so lost interest in this book that I don’t really care that next Saturday at 12:01 a.m. I’ll be able to purchase the final installment.
Most of this book has slipped through my mind without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
But I’m the only person in the world who feels this way, I’m sure.