# What is the first sentence from the book you are currently reading?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Tags:** books-writing-myths
**Created:** [April 20, 2017, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858 "2017-04-20T16:51:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 171
### Author:  [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)
#### Post date: [August 2, 2025, 7:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3411 "2025-08-02T19:53:17Z")
“The two elephants in the huge, dimly lit van were tired and restless and irritated.”
_The Long Way Down_, by Robb White
“We have not one, but two brains.”
_Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut_, by Elsa Richardson.
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### Author:  [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)
#### Post date: [August 2, 2025, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3412 "2025-08-02T20:21:12Z")
Outside Vindobonum
Provincia Pannonia Superior
Imperium Romanum
September 5, 167 CE
Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus stepped up to the edge of the purple-draped wooden platform on a cool, bright autumn morning, standing tall.
_The Winds of Fate_, by S M Stirling
One day in early June 1944 the heavily laden troop transports lifted anchor and began moving slowly out of Pearl Harbor.
_Their Backs Against the Sea: The Battle of Saipan and the Largest Banzai Attack of World War II_, by Bill Sloan
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [August 3, 2025, 4:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3413 "2025-08-03T04:05:48Z")
“Ronnie Childers was tripping his balls off in Jackson Square when an angel of the Lord appeared to him.”
_Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books_ by Kirsten Miller
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### Author:  [@Railer13](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Railer13)
#### Post date: [August 3, 2025, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3414 "2025-08-03T21:27:05Z")
“Maybe we should’ve tried marriage counseling.”
_A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage_ by Asia Mackay
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### Author:  [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)
#### Post date: [August 6, 2025, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3415 "2025-08-06T21:37:11Z")
“It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.”
_The Remains of the Day_, by Kazuo Ishiguro
“Not long ago, bigness was the thing.”
_In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World_, by Simon Garfield
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2025, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3416 "2025-08-10T03:34:22Z")
“One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering along like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.”
_The Martian Chronicles_ by Ray Bradbury, illustr. by Dennis Calero
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### Author:  [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)
#### Post date: [August 10, 2025, 12:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3417 "2025-08-10T12:26:21Z")
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening.
_Soulless_, by Gail Carriger
Berlin,April 30, 1945
For those of Hitler’s men still in the heart of the city’s government sector, the Battle of Berlin was almost lost.
_The Axmann Conspiracy: The Nazi Plan for a Fourth Reich and How the U.S. Army defeated It_, by Scott Andrew Selby
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### Author:  [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)
#### Post date: [August 11, 2025, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3418 "2025-08-11T23:37:13Z")
“It was early February and snowing again in Boston.”
_Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property_, by Mike Lupica
“The story so far: the Polysyllabic Spree, the ninety-seven young, elegant, cultured, aromatic, but occasionally gullible editors of The Believer, went to Vegas, got drunk, and put everything they owned–named the magazine, plus some aromatherapy oil and a couple of chapbooks–on the number 21 in a game of roulette.”
_Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas: A Collection of Riotously Entertaining Columns Written for The Believer magazine During its Years in the Desert_, by Nick Hornby
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### Author:  [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)
#### Post date: [August 12, 2025, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3419 "2025-08-12T01:37:08Z")
March 16 - July 9, 1943
The news arrived by mail in a brief mimeographed, unsigned letter from the dean of students, University of California, Berkeley.
_Infantry Soldier: Holding the Line at the Battle of the Bulge_, by George W Neill
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### Author:  [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)
#### Post date: [August 14, 2025, 9:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3420 "2025-08-14T21:20:51Z")
“Two Spanish soldiers swaggered up Tower Street toward William Shakespeare.”
_Ruled Britannia_, by Harry Turtledove.
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [August 15, 2025, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3421 "2025-08-15T03:03:51Z")
“Sadie Given woke from a troubled sleep, the stupid phone babbling like an angry turkey, gobble-gobble, gobble-gobble.”
– _The Big Empty_, by Robert Crais
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### Author:  [@Elendil\_s\_Heir](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elendil_s_Heir)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2025, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3422 "2025-08-18T02:30:35Z")
“At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage at the amphitheater in Chautauqua to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.”
_Knife_ by Salman Rushdie
“This is gonna be my stupidest death ever.”
_Mickey7_ by Edward Ashton
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### Author:  [@EddyTeddyFreddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EddyTeddyFreddy)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2025, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3423 "2025-08-18T03:39:23Z")
“With a punch of sharp sulphur, the little match snapped to life, flame biting at its wooden stump, hungry for a wick to feed on.”
_The Thirteenth Child,_ by Erin A. Craig
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### Author:  [@SCAdian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SCAdian)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2025, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3424 "2025-08-18T15:45:58Z")
March 11, 1944
A thick black smoke streamed into Jacques and Andrée Marçaise’s fifth-floor apartment at 22 rue Le Sueur in the heart of Paris’s fashionable 16th arrondissement.
_Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris_, by David King
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### Author:  [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)
#### Post date: [August 18, 2025, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3425 "2025-08-18T20:49:12Z")
“Histories of studio filmmaking have a habit of skimming over the disasters–those moments of doomed expenditure that pull the curtain back on what the culture was thinking.”
_Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops_, by Tim Robey
“Once, somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere, there was a district called–oh, let’s call it Inglewell.”
_Flyaway_ by Kathleen Jennings.
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### Author:  [@EddyTeddyFreddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EddyTeddyFreddy)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2025, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3426 "2025-08-19T00:22:24Z")
“I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.”
_Hemlock & Silver_ by T. Kingfisher.
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### Author:  [@Dung\_Beetle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dung_Beetle)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2025, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3427 "2025-08-19T00:28:14Z")
Oh man! I haven’t got my copy yet.
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### Author:  [@EddyTeddyFreddy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EddyTeddyFreddy)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2025, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3428 "2025-08-19T00:29:30Z")
My local bookseller got her shipment today, emailed me immediately with the payment link, I fired payment right back, and within a half hour THE BOOK WAS MINE!!! BWA-HAHAHAHAHA!!!
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### Author:  [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)
#### Post date: [August 20, 2025, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3429 "2025-08-20T21:52:43Z")
“Welcome to the Nifty Fifties!”
– _Snafu: The Definitive Guide to History’s Greatest Screwups_, by Ed Helms.
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### Author:  [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)
#### Post date: [August 21, 2025, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-first-sentence-from-the-book-you-are-currently-reading/784858/3430 "2025-08-21T04:37:37Z")
Florentino Aspillaga’s final posting was in Bratislava, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
_Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know_ by Malcolm Gladwell
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