Where better to launch a patriotic uprising than Faneuil Hall in Boston?
The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire by Stephen Kinzer
*Tommy Wiseau has always been an eccentric dresser, but on a late-summer night in 2002 he was turning the heads of every model, weirdo, transvestite and face-lift artist in and around Hollywood’s Palm Restaurant. *
–The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made
“It is Christmas Eve.” (Note: Not technically the first sentence, but the first in the title story, Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons.)
“I regret exceedingly–” said M. Hercule Poirot. (The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler.)
“On April 27, 1822, Ulysses S. Grant was born in Point Pleasant, Ohio, tucked away in the rural southwestern corner of the state near Cincinnati.”
– Grant, by Ron Chernow
I realize this is not a competition, and it is not possible to “win” a thread, however:
“The more avant-garde an author is, the less he can allow himself to be labeled as such.”
(cont’d) “But who cares about that? In fact, my opening sentence is just a McGuffin having little to do with what I intend to relate, though it could be that in the long run all I can tell about my invitation to Kassel and my later trip to that city will eventually have everything to do with that sentence.”
Enrique Vila-Matas, The Illogic of Kassel translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and Anna Milsom
Actually, I was reading A Wrinkle In Time when I first saw this thread which truly starts:
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
J.
They charged from the cover of the elephant grass toward the LZ, five of them swarming the slick on both sides, one among them yelling "Go! Go! Go!’–as if each man needed to be prodded and reminded that these were the most dangerous seconds of their lives.–The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Michael Connelly
“In the year 1869, when the population of New York City had reached nearly a million, the occupants of 28 East 20th Street, a five-story brownstone, numbered six, excluding the servants.”
– Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough, his biography of Theodore Roosevelt
“Many years ago an editor from Reader’s Digest in New York invited me to write a 100-word story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Tell Tale, a collections of short stories by Jeffrey Archer
“On June 15, the first troops of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee commanding, slip across the Potomac at Williamsport and begin the invasion of the North.”
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara.
“The night I called at the Manhattan General to pick up this lady doctor I was dating, something quite extraordinary happened.”
MISSION, by Patrick Tilley
“Why do cows have horns?”
How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: Darwinian Stories Told Through Evolutionary Biology, by Leo Grasset.
“Trade season came around again”
The Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson.
It’s hard to explain what it is I like about it, but it’s incredibly engrossing.
“At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, the victorious British government is nearly bankrupt from the costs of the war.”— The Glorious Cause, Jeff Shaara
Right there with you. According to her Twitter feed, she’s still working on edits. I hope that doesn’t mean a delay.
Meantime, I just finished Cast in Deception by Michelle Sagara, which ends on a cliffhanger, and all I can do is scream ARRRRGGGHHHH. She’d been publishing the books in this series about once a year, but this one was more like 18 months after the last one. I know it takes as long as it takes, but man, I hope she gets the next one out SOON.
IN THE SECOND HALF OF the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities.
*The Race Underground *by Doug Most
Well, that’s embarrassing. I knew this thread sounded familiar; I am back to the same book from September! I read others in between, but am back to slogging through this one.
“The primroses were over.” Watership Down by Richard Adams. I’ve been wanting to read it for decades but only just got around to it. So far I’m not disappointed.
“Joe Stalin was never happier than on the day he died.” - After the End of the World by Jonathan L. Howard