simster
December 28, 2010, 5:26pm
#1
The corrolary.
Opening lines to book(s) that made you question the sanity of continuing further…
So - while I can’t remember any off the top of my head - I’m sure others can.
“It was a dark and stormy night” - Snoopy
From Tim Powers ’s otherwise excellent novel, Declare , comes this gem of an opening sentence:
The young captain’s hands were sticky with blood on the steering wheel as he cautiously backed the jeep in a tight turn off the rutted mud track onto a patch of level snow that shone in the intermittent moonlight on the edge of the gorge, and then his left hand seemed to freeze onto the gear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever up into first gear.
The book gets good after the first 100 pages or so, but getting to that point, through sentences like that, was a bit of a slog.
simster:
The corrolary.
Opening lines to book(s) that made you question the sanity of continuing further…
So - while I can’t remember any off the top of my head - I’m sure others can.
“It was a dark and stormy night” - Snoopy
And a whole lot of other authors, most notably Madeline L’Engle’s classic A Wrinkle in Time"
dotchan
December 28, 2010, 6:06pm
#4
I read a lot of fan fiction (I know, I know). You know you’re in trouble when the writer can’t even bother to use proper spelling, punctuation, and/or grammar.