“I’m sitting in a greenroom across from Mel Brooks on a Tuesday afternoon in February.”
-The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy, by Kliph Nesteroff
“In the face of a deteriorating British economy and the rise of the Nazis on the European continent, Marxism became fashionable among undergraduates at Cambridge and Oxford universities between 1930 and 1936.”
Trotsky’s Run by Richard Hoyt (1982)
“Lopside hoped to find a rat.”
Voyage of the Dogs, by Greg van Eekhout.
“On the first Monday of the month of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of ROMANCE OF THE ROSE was born, appeared to be in as perfect a state of revolution as if the Huguenots had just made a second La Rochelle of it.”
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
In the summer of his twelfth year - the summer the stars began to fall from the sky - the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell east from west with his eyes closed.
Axis by Robert Charles Wilson (I’m working my way through the trilogy.)
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
“It was an unmarked car, just some nondescript American sedan a few years old, but the blackwall tires and the three men inside gave it away for what it was.”
The Outsider: A Novel, by Stephen King
The book is Fear: Trump in the White House, by Bob Woodward, but I feel this needs to be a two-fer:
The Prologue, the pages of which are in Roman numerals: “In early September 2017, in the eighth month of the Trump presidency, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser in the White House, moved cautiously toward the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.”
Then the first sentence of the book proper: “In August 2010, six years before taking over Donald Trump’s winning presidential campaign, Steve Bannon, then 57 and a producer of right-wing political films, answered his phone.”
This completely fascinating first sentence sent me to Amazon to learn more about the book: “In early twentieth-century New York, poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime. Science had no place in the Tammany Hall-controlled coroner’s office, and corruption ran rampant.” I mean, could you die?
I’ve put this book on my wishlist, which now stretches from here to the moon.
Not to mention, someday, somehow, I will use the term “loony little porter”. 
“It all starts out so well.”
Everything Trump Touches Dies by Rick Wilson
“It’s a room an uninspired playwright might conjure while staring at a blank page: White walls. White ceiling. White floor.”
Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff
One muggy afternoon in 1988, some local men were selling peanuts at the entrance to the botanical gardens in Penang, Malaysia.Sex at Dawn: How we mate, why we stray, and what it means for modern relationships – Ryan and Jetha
In the summer of 1977, a fire swept across the wilderness of interior Alaska, west of Denali, which was then still officially known as Mount McKinley.
– Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips
“My mother selected her wings as early morning light reached through our balcony shutters.”
Updraft, by Fran Wilde
“There were no windows in the Brin 2 facility–rotation meant that ‘outside’ was always ‘down’, underfoot, out of mind.”
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
“Parched by the blazing sun of summer, the grassy plain of the steppe country is light brown in hue.”
– Enemy at the Gates: The Battle for Stalingrad, by William Craig
“Someone once said that youth is wasted on the young.”
Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End, by Jennifer Worth
“In the summer of 1942, four hundred million people in Europe lay under the yoke of German rule.”
The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot, 1952. One helluva history of the Second World War!
“I slip the dress over my head.”
Recipe for Disaster, by Stacey Ballis
“The long curve of the bay window faced the River Harb and the late-afternoon traffic of the tugboats and barges plying their way between the two states.”
King’s Ransom – Ed McBain