First Sentences: Another "Whatcha reading?" thread

[koeeoaddi]

I just started Boomsday by Christopher Buckley

“Cassandra Devine was not yet thirty, but she was already tired.”

[Fearless_Leader]

“My suffering left me sad and gloomy.” - Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

[Judith_Prietht]

I’m currently reading Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, which begins:

“A white Pomeranian named Fluffly flew out of a fifth-floor window in Panna, which was a brand-new building with the painter’s scaffolding still around it.”

[Catamount]

@Chum

I like this thread.

“‘I can never bring myself to believe it, John,’ said Mary Walker the pretty daughter of Mr George Walker, attorney of Silverbridge.”

-Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset

That’s a pretty boring first line, but the book is great. To make up for it, I’ll give a quote from it that I liked so much I had to write down:

“How common with us it is to repine that the devil is not stronger over us than he is.”

I love Anthony Trollope!

I just finished reading the Chronicles of Barset last month (it took me half a year to do it–looooooong books). I’ve discovered that the even-numbered ones are the best. The odd ones deal too much with Romances and Who Will Marry Whom, but the others have more scandal in them to spice things up between romantic mooning.

[Justin_Bailey]

I’m currently reading Dies the Fire by S.M. Stirling:

Michael Havel pulled his battered four-by-four into the employees’ parking lot, locked up and swung his just-in-case gearout of the back, the strap of the pack over one shoulder and the gun case on the other.

After I started reading it I looked over my bookshelf and realized I have a real thing for “It’s the end of the world as we know it” fiction after this, The Stand, World War Z, Fear Nothing and probably a few others I missed.

Of course, that doesn’t explain the other book I’m reading, It’s Not News, It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap As News by Drew Curtis. I’d love to give you the first line, but I don’t have the book handy and I can’t pull it off of Amazon.

[toadspittle]

Material life is made up of people and things.
—The Structures of Everyday Life by Fernand Braudel (nonfiction)

and

The book you are holding in your two hands right now—assuming that you are, in fact, holding this book, and that you have only two hands—is one of two books in the world that will show you the difference between the word “nervous” and the word “anxious.”
—The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket

[Catamount]

I picked up another book to take my mind of the truly wretched weekend I just had.

“Without, a midwinter twilight, where wandering snowflakes eddied in the bitter wind between a leaden sky and frost-bound earth.
Within, a garret; gloomy, bare, and cold as the bleak night coming down.”
A Modern Mephisopheles by Louisa May Alcott

Very good book. According to the introduction, Alcott liked “sensational fiction” better than the Good Little Girls book she’s known for. The blurb on the back cover describes it as “A novel of psychological complexity that touches on controversial topics such as sexuality and drug use…”. Spicy stuff for Victorian America.

[Inner_Stickler]

“The mail I get is mysterious at best.” ~Penny Candy by Jean Kerr.

and

“Surprisingly, many anglers are ashamed to admit that they fish with live bait.” ~They Shoot Canoes, Don’t They? by Patrick F. McManus