“It was the day before yesterday and I was dead.”
Robert Rankin: The Brightonomicon
It makes you wonder how the narrator is brought back to life (unless you’re expecting some Desperate Housewives-like narration).
“The day I died started out bad and got worse in a hurry.”
Undead and Unwed, by Mary Janice Davidson. Not really a good book, but I love that line. It was enough to make me want to read more.
“Dinnie, an overweight enemy of humanity, was the worst violinist in New York, but was practicing gamely when two cute little fairies stumbled through his fourth-floor window and vomited on the carpet.”
The Good Fairies of New York, by Martin Millar
I’m glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read this! I think I just woke my wife up by laughing at this, though.
Henry Huggins was in the third grade. His hair looked like a scrubbing brush and most of his grown-up full teeth were in. Except for having his tonsils out when he was six and breaking his arm falling out of a cherry tree when he was seven, nothing much happened to Henry.
I wish something exciting would happen, Henry often thought.
Henry Huggins, by Beverly Cleary
I was going to quote Little, Big, but that’s been done…
I want to be famous. Really famous.
I want to be so famous that movie stars hang out with me and talk about what a bummer their lives are. I want to beat up photographers who catch me in hotel lobbies with Winona Ryder. I want to be implicated in vicious rumours about Drew Barrymore’s sex parties. And, finally, I want to be pronounced DOA in a small, tired, LA hospital after doing speedballs with Matt Damon.
I want it all. I want the American Dream.
Syrup, by Max Berry
Or
Monday morning and there’s one less donut than there should be.
Company, by Max Berry
Two great books.
Well that was the one I came in to suggest, so I think it translates pretty well…
“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.”
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I also quite like…
“Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortaility we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man - what was left of man - was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery knows as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepare to leave the city of my birth and death.”
- Neverness by David Zindell
This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.
The Princess Bride. Great start to a great satire.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
Hyperion.
Take a look at post #13.
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers.
Ooh, yes, that’s a good one, Chez Guevara! I recall thinking “Oh, right then, Mr. Burgess/Mr. Wilson, so I might as well read this with a dictionary by my side? I see.”
I like the first line of 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Perfectly ordinary, maybe even mundane way of setting a scene until the very last word lets you know something’s a little bit… off. An earlier draft had “It was a cold day in early April, and a million radios were striking thirteen.” Hurray for editing! The million radios steal the focus and make “thirteen” less, uh, striking. It also obscures the POV, since one man couldn’t be hearing a million radios.
He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead.
Stars My Destination (aka Tyger! Tyger!) by Alfred Bester.
“Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler’s pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.”
–Fight Club
“Who is John Galt?”
–Atlas Shrugged
“Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.”
–Watchmen
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
–Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“It was a nice day.”
–Good Omens
“In five years, the penis will be obsolete,” said the salesman. - “Steel Beach” by John Varley.
And, on the theme of penis-related literature…
*Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar
Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly
human at all. * - “Dirty White Boys” by Stephen Hunter.
I’ll try to think of some that don’t involve genitalia…
thwartme
Jesus, how did I miss that? Sorry, Cisco! In my defense, I do get interrupted a lot, so my posts can take a long time to compose…
But it is a good book!
I don’t have my Bukowski books handy, and I’m sure this is not his best opening but it’s pretty good:
“I was 50 years old and hadn’t been to bed with a woman for four years. I had no women friends. I looked at them as I passed them on the streets or wherever I saw them, but I looked at them without yearning and with a sense of futility. I masturbated regularly, but the idea of having a relationship with a woman—even on non-sexual terms—was beyond my imagination.” - Women, Charles Bukowski
It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey. -Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins