My new favorite opening paragraphs of a novel

I’ve had a few over the years, openings that just throw you into the story and you forget you are reading. . War of the Worlds - No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely… David Copperfield - Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. Others.

When I was a child, I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books. She happened to be an answer on Jeopardy the other day, and just for nostaglia I ordered the hardcover illustrated edition.

Here is the opening of which I speak-

A long time ago, when all of the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. They drove away and left it lonely and empty in the clearing among the big trees, and they never saw that little house again.

They were going to the Indian country.

What child, or 5 or 7 or 12, would not have their imagination sparked, nay, set on fire by that? Any child of that age would know intuitively that their grandparents weren’t always that old, but probably never pictured them at their age. Or not being born yet. And the family leaving their home and leaving it lonely, never to be seen again, on a great adventure, this is like a combination of Robert Louis Stevenson and Hemingway, with Ingall’s sparse writing style.

Of couse you would write that way in a children’s book, some of it reads like the Tip and MItten books I read in first grade. But ya know, the Nick Adams stories by Hemingway read very similar.

I bought this to re-read as if I were a child, and while I’ve only read the first couple of chapters, am enjoying it as as adult

Two I have always liked:

“I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others’, but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from the temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match between Jehoshaphat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf at this court.”
----- Pär Lagerkvist, The Dwarf

“You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. You can make a flying guess; you can make a lot of flying guesses.

You can list them in the order of their probability. The likely ones are easy: he might go after another drink, start a fight, make a speech, take a train… You can work down the list of possibilities; he might buy some green paint, chop down a maple tree, do a fan dance, sing ‘God Save the King,’ steal an oboe…. You can work on down and down to things that get less and less likely, and eventually you might hit the rock bottom of improbability; he might make a resolution and stick to it.”
-----Fredric Brown, The Screaming Mimi

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson is still the best pirate story ever written.

It has a great opening:

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

    "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
    Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars.

Reminds me of a line in Moby Dick - *

I would rather sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.*

You just reminded me, I have an illustrated copy of Treasure Island, beautiful hard cover edition, listed as a children’s book, I have never read. Wordsworth Editions Limited. Can’t find it online, even searching the ISBN number turns up nothing. Maybe it is so rare it is worth a thousand dollars! LOL

I wish I could go back and change the title of this thread. As much as I appreciate the comments so far, and will continue to do so for the comments to come, I really meant this to be about the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, wondering how many people here read and loved them.

I did. I have the full set. Some of my favorite moments:

The Sugaring-off dance, When Mr. Edwards “met” Santa Claus, Almanzo and the drawing room wallpaper, the Ingalls family hearing the church bell in the dark on the prairie, the family’s first train ride, Almanzo and Cap bringing back the wheat, the school exhibition, and Laura’s home after she marries Almanzo.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.

Was final Jeopardy ther other day and I didn’t get it, the clue was so badly worded, IMO.

We will see, I may just have to get the full set and make a special shelf on the wall for them. I remember reading these books when I was 7-10, and loving them so much (along with The Black Stallion books)

Do you know that PBS has an American Masters about her? I have PBS Passport, for which I pay $5 a month, but it is on YouTube.

I remember standing in Waldenbooks reading the first page of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and being so amused I immediately bought the book. (Sorry but my copy of the novel is in storage so I can’t quote it.)

Yes. I’ve read a number of articles about her life, but I’ve never seen that particular American Masters.

About nine years ago, The New Yorker ran an article about how Rose Ingalls Wilder was fervently right-wing and libertarian (and that this philosophy influenced the novels).

I read that one.

They’re out there.

I fell in love with the opening of Snow Crash. By Neal Stephenson

"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway—might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator."

There’s lots more and it’s great.

The novel also has the greatest name for the book’s hero/protagonist:
Hiro Protagonist

I don’t have the entire first paragraph, but my favorite opening sentence is from Quest for a Maid, by Frances M. Hendry:

“When I was nine years old, I hid beneath a table and heard my sister kill a king.”

Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber
It’s also on video. Chris O’Dowd, Gillian Anderson, Romola Garai

Watch your step. Keep your wits about you; you will need them.

This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before. You may imagine, from other stories you’ve read, that you know it well, but those stories flattered you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is that you are an alien from another time and place altogether.