Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Which is why I only own one Gaiman book, and even that was a gift. Even streaming music made by cunts feels bad nowadays.. but I remind myself that there's thousands others out there.. so I just block the cunts and move on. (Black metal especially has quite a bit of nazis, unfortunately)
Never turn people into heroes, it’s an unearned pedesta
My approach is similar, but I limit it to living people. Once they've passed it's unlikely much of anything will come to light in the future that changes one's perspective
It is a great book and the other two in the trilogy are just as good. I'm going through all of Gibson's works right now. Currently in Agency and loving it.
Just starting his Jackpot trilogy. I watched the series, they canceled it just as it was getting good. Wonder if that has anything to do with the incomplete books.
I believe that the show was cancelling due to a combination of the writers/actors strike and Amazon just having a nagging tendency to cancel expensive shows. The Peripheral does stray from the books a bit, but it was so good. The cancelling of their good shows and their bullshit extra fee to not see ads made me just stop watching Prime Video completely.
The books are excellent though, super excited about the last book (whenever it comes out). They are my favorite books of his since the Sprawl trilogy (aka Neuromancer books).
The characters were great, and the cast worked well, too. Second season people had settled in to their roles and it flowed better. Especially liked Alexandra Billings’ Lowbeer. That androgyny and smiling threat with presence brought to the character was awesome.
I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'
Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.
Well, the action happens in Chicago. And there's a special investigations unit that's not very respected as far as I can remember(it's a sort of dead end job that nobody wants) that he deals with and there's a couple of good cops and a couple of bad cops there. For all the rest, the books keep mentioning how he doesn't trust other cops, how many of them are in the pockets of mobsters and other villains, etc. There's even corrupt fbi agents as antagonists in the second book.
Which is a very American mindset that is built upon our sense of "freedom".
The bad guy is a bad cop. Bad cops exist. But the cavalry (in this case, Murphy and her partner and Butters and Michael and so forth) are the good cops. Because, when the chips are down, the real heroic cops come to help.
It is much more prevalent in military fiction because... ACAB is a common phrase for a reason. One of the best examples is the Bradley Cooper A-Team movie (also a really fun movie). On its surface? The villain is a rogue CIA officer (also maybe a rogue general? Been a minute). But throughout the entire movie we have the titular team regularly talk about how much they learned in the military and Rocket Raccoon can't help but want to bang the hell out of the good military cop who both wants to capture them AND wants to know the truth. And, when the chips are down, she is there to save the day.
Its one of those things you don't pick up on until you do a lot of reading... or think about why The Military is so willing to allow the use of men and material in filming. If they weren't okay with the idea of a rogue officer then they would have refused the use of IFVs and so forth. PLENTY of movies end up stuck using stock footage because of that.
But no. It is very much the extension of "a few bad apples don't ruin the bunch" that is used to handwave evil shit that cops (and the military) does.
Butcher isn't the only writer who does that shit. But it is one of those things where "So... does he realize he is doing it?" up until the "cops are the light in the darkness" wank fest during The Battle of Chicago (I forgot which book).
It is up to you whether you care or not. I semi-recently rambled about/glazed a movie that I outright consider CCP propaganda that stars "The Tom Cruise of Hong Kong". And... I will watch basically any Donnie Yen movie because he is just that charismatic and physically magnificent. But I also make it a point to think through WHY specific roles were chosen or specific dialogue was spoken even as I am cheering on him fighting his way out of essentially a favela.
I would say, up until the hiatus, it was very much the "Not All Cops Are Bastards" kind of work. Murphy (who was apparently the insert of Butcher's now ex-wife) is obvious but even her partner mostly is just "guilty" of thinking this weird PI who knows things he shouldn't and is constantly seen talking with criminals might not be on the up and up. Same with Morgan (? Harry's magic parole officer) who mostly was just depicted as so focused on justice and the danger of black magic that he didn't trust the guy who had previously used black magic and who is canonically going to go REAL fucking dark later.
And Michael et al are VERY cop adjacent.
But things really shifted once Harry became a magic cop himself. The "I am opposed to authority but damn if I don't look good with a badge" kind of story.
Then we had the hiatus and came back to The Battle of Chicago where Butcher spent a full chapter worshiping cops and talking about how they are the literal light in the darkness.
Which is pretty consistent with a lot of copaganda (also military propaganda). The idea that there are bad eggs but by and large they are great and here is this godlike human being that also happens to be a cop. Think "Dirty Harry" or a LOT of Donnie Yen movies.
Contrast that with someone like a Richard Kadrey who makes it an entire plot point that one of the big bads is a cop who is literally protected by police unions and qualified immunity (also there is zero chance that Richard Kadrey doesn't have hundreds of pages of very explicit Sonic OC fan fiction. And I say that as a compliment).
And on the "weirdo" note: Let's just say it is a very open secret who Lara Raithe is "inspired by". Although many women in the publishing and convention organizing community have stories of being compared to her... And everyone tries not to think too hard who Molly (Harry's best friend's daughter that he knew almost her entire life who just can't stop throwing her tight naked body at Harry...) is.
If Zoey Ashe had known she was being stalked by a man who intended to kill her and then slowly eat her bones, she would have worried more about that and less about getting her cat off the roof.
– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"
Some beautiful turns of phrase throughout. Maybe I should revisit these now that I'm less worried about missing out on something, so I can just browse and skip around.
He was a big fan of the power of the first line. You can really see it in a lot of his books.
His last ever book started with
"The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado."
Or maybe it's the second para. I haven't got my copy on me. But I memorised the last bit on the spot.
I especially like that line in Neuromancer because at the time he wrote it, his audience would've understood he meant TV snow. Meaning the sky was overcast, giving a gloomy mood. But younger people now will think of that featureless blue that modern TVs use, which indicates a beautiful cloudless day. Totally different mood!
Went into this comment section with Kafkas "Metamorphosis" in mind, I love the opening, the whole story is genius and to this day perfectly describes large parts of German society.
All three quotes are great, how you can captivate a reader just with one sentence, all three do this perfectly.
His older books ended pretty well IMO. It was only the later books where they sometimes make a major turn near the end and get nuts. I sometimes enjoy the craziness of it, but Seveneves was particularly jarring.
I like to believe that his editor told him that enough was enough and that we had to end the damn book. And, if it was not for the editor he would still be writing the book, not not revising it, just making it longer and longer.
I absolutely get you. I do enjoy his books, mostly because they tend to center around a really great premise and are entertaining enough that I can not let the bad parts ruin it for me.
That book was a slog. Took forever to get to the inevitable you knew was going to happen, glossed over the worldbuilding, and ended it just as things got interesting.
Disaster Area's songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
I really do recommend it. Just know that the end is basically a separate novella, that is completely different in tone. I would suggest giving it some time at the least before you read the last of it at the least.
I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir
I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked. Six days into what should be one of the greatest two months of my life, and it’s turned into a nightmare. I don’t even know who’ll read this. I guess someone will find it eventually. Maybe a hundred years from now. For the record…I didn’t die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can’t blame them. Maybe there’ll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, “Mark Watney is the only human being to have died on Mars.”
I just reread that and Project Hail Mary, because I finally read Artemis and needed more Andy Weir. That man tickles exactly the right part of my brain.
I can't get into his writing. I like his stories, but his prose is always bubbling with this unearned enthusiasm that doesn't let the reader actually feel what they want to feel about a situation ("this is so cool!" okay, I guess I should feel happy this...). Plus his characters are all essentially interchangeable with maybe one or two tacked on characteristics that desperately scream "look at me, I'm quirky!" You always have the impression that he's just using his characters as props to accelerate the plot, and once they're off the page they're essentially waiting in stasis to be called back into action.
Contrast this style of writing to Ann Leckie's SciFi writing, where characters are defined largely by their actions and spoken word is a luxury used to deliver cutting statements that give insights into the rich tapestry of culture, where you're not even aware of their physical characteristics such as gender or number of limbs, because they ultimately do not matter and they let you the reader form your own idea and own opinion of the scene taking place in front of you.
He doesn't hint at a wider world, he just outright states exactly what's happening in any given scene, and I guess I just find that somewhat lazy/insulting
Yeah, absolutely. That and Jennifer Government. We’re getting all the shitty dystopian aspects of cyberpunk without all the cool technological advances.
Personally I think the first three novels are very strong and the fourth a good prequel too. It goes off the rails after that one though, like a crazy chu chu train so to speak.
I didn't mind the connection between other books all that much, but the self-insertion, Dr. Dooms and Harry Potter snitches were a bit much and almost felt like parody.
I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.
Other than the epigraph for the prologue, it is sort of the first line of the book. Because the part about Kalak is the “Prelude to the Stormlight Archive,” and after that the book says “Book One \n The Way of Kings” and then goes on to the prologue.
Yeah i think the thing that gets me is that he likes to drop a lot of fantasy proper nouns at the same time in both those openings. There are ten heralds and this scene is so important it's only fitting to happen there. And I think in a visual medium it might've gotten me better, or maybe had I been reading instead of doing the audio book.
I stand by the kelsier plantation scene being a worse opening than just starting with Vin though
Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:
Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips.
He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips.
For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first
sentence.
He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go.
Which early Prachett book starts with a guru or wizard obtaining enlightenment then asking his apprentice "go on ask me any question I have observed everything and know it all!" the appretice asked him what he wants for breakfast "ah, one of the difficult ones"
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
Came here to post this. Just re-reading the books, finished Drawing yesterday. I'm already so in love with the characters again. Will, once more, be heartbroken by Wizard & Glass.
Despite all the shortcomings of the final books, this is just the best King ever wrote.
(And I would really love to read the versions of 5, 6 and 7 from the parallel reality where King didn't have the accident. But who knows, maybe he'd never finished the story without it.)
Yeah, King's endings tend to be a little messy and narratively unsatisfying sometimes. Gunslinger is easily my favorite of the series and just about every other thing he's written. On my last read through the story, I started with my original copy of The Gunslinger, then read through the rest of the series (reading the disconnected but related stories just before the final book), and finished with the revised edition of The Gunslinger.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.
Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.
Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of
wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was
the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct
to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period
was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities
insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative
degree of comparison only.
Kinda the point. It's supposed to drill into your head how everything in that period was taken to the extremes by taking the prose itself to the extremes.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
He won a Pulitzer for the novel Martin Dressler but I haven't read it. His short stories, however, are fantastic. The Barnum Museum is maybe the best collection? I'm not sure. Read Eisenheim the Illusionist. They made a kinda shitty movie that has nothing to do with it starring Paul Giamatti
I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
I remember finding a Shadow Warrior novel (based on the video game) and I only remember how it opened because it was batshit insane. Lo Wang is at a restaurant trying to decide what to get weighing the pros and cons of getting some fish thing that he knows would give him major gas and he didn't want to upset some woman he was going to be with latwr by stinking up the joint, when a bunch of the big bad's ninjas show up and try to kill him. He easily kills them all, and at one point cuts one of their noses off and flicks it into the bowl of soup another patron looking on in horror had ordered, while Wang thinks to himself that guy is gonna take the nose home to show his children and tell the story about how Lo Wang stopped a bunch of evil ninjas.
I read this in high school and even as a teen who loved that shit, I thought it was cringe af. Like a wild fanfic you'd find on a blog or forum. Yet I paid money for it in a book.
Wang, without seeming to slow the spinning knives, snipped off a small piece of the assassin's nose and caught it in his left hand, holding it up for the assassin to see.
“Looks like chicken,” Lo Wang said, turning the hunk of nose around in front of the man. “Chicken a favorite of mine.” Wang smiled, spun the hunk of nose around slowly in his fingers, licking his lips, and then tossed the nose over his shoulder so that it landed near the businessmen behind the bar. They could keep it as a souvenir of their lunch. Maybe even dip it in plastic, mount it on a nice plaque, and hang it over the fireplace. Then when telling the story to their grandchildren, they could point to the hunk of nose with pride.
It's a shame the rest of the book must have been boring compared to this, since I do not remember anything else. I wish I still had it. But I'm assuming it was pretty easy to find, considering you got the whole chunk of it I was thinking of and my description didn't even do it justice. 🤣
I thought it was cringe af. Like a wild fanfic you’d find on a blog or forum. Yet I paid money for it in a book.
Tbf, Shadow Warrior in general has always struck me like that. Ridiculously over the top to the point of being cringe, but it's so clearly intentional it circles back to being funny. To me at least.
The first line of Shirley Jackson's Haunting Of Hill House is a banger, the complete first paragraph is incredible.
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. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone
The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.
— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North
"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."
Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.
Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.
One that always stayed with me is from a coming-of-age story:
If truth was a crayon and it was up to me to put a wrapper around it and name its color, I know just what I would call it—dinosaur skin.
Sarah Weeks - So B. It
If you're curious, here's the rest of the first chapter which really ties the first sentence together nicely:
I used to think, without really thinking about it, that I knew what color that was. But that was a long time ago, before I knew what I know now about both dinosaur skin and the truth.
The fact is, you can’t tell squat about the color of an animal just from looking at its bones, so nobody knows for sure what color dinosaurs really were. For years I looked at pictures of them, trusting that whoever was in charge of coloring them in was doing it based on scientific fact, but the truth is they were only guessing. I realized that one afternoon, sitting in the front seat of Sheriff Roy Franklin’s squad car, the fall before I turned thirteen.
Another thing I found out right around that same time is that not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re stupid. All it means is that there’s still room left to wonder. For instance about dinosaurs—were they the same color as the sky the morning I set off for Liberty? Or were they maybe the same shade of brown as the dust my shoes kicked up on the driveway at Hilltop Home?
I’d be lying if I said that given a choice, I wouldn’t rather know than not know. But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.
The truth is, whether you know something or not doesn’t change what was. If dinosaurs were blue, they were blue; if they were brown, they were brown whether anybody ever knows it for a fact or not.
But there are some things you can just know for no good reason other than that you do, and then there are other things that no matter how badly you want to know them, you just can’t.
Huh, actually a rather good summary of Godel's Theorom. Cool.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
An evocative one which has stayed with me: “I had barely regained the ability to walk. I could not chase women, but could slowly make my way up the stairs to the whorehouse.”
I can’t remember where it’s from. Perhaps Bukowski or one of his contemporaries?
The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.
Before you read The Daughters War check out The Blacktongue Thief. And if you like that, I'd also recommend Between Two Fires. Christopher Buehlman is fantastic.
The first line of James Ellroy's LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
There's something about Ellroy's clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it "shotgun prose") that grabbed me from the very first moment.
An abandoned auto court in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninetyfour thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border--right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootjack a piece of his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River.
This is the story of a bloodstained boy. There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. - Railsea, China Mieville.
The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green, saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.
One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
-John Dies at the End
And my personal favorite...
I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.
“Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” -- Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Really, that whole first chapter is incredible. One of those rare books where the first chapter is so compelling that you just have to keep on reading.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
-Lolita by Nabokov
It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.
And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit.
In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.
I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:
Del mare non sappiamo nulla.
Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto.
All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.
We know nothing about the ocean.
Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything.
In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.
See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches
him.
Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.
On second thought, it may not work so well in books, unless they're illustrated novels (or comics, as we used to call them, even though they weren't all that funny).
“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
How Many People In This World Know The Aim Of Human Birth As Defined By God?
This is one of great opening line which I know:
The holy book Geeta, which is the direct voice of God for the entire humanity irrespective of any religion or nationality, says that human birth has been graced by God to break the cycle of millions of birth and deaths since infinite time, and to get escaped from this world forever and achieve the Supreme.
How To Achieve The Aim Of Human Life?
By chanting God's name constantly and meditatively along with all our righteous deeds selflessly throughout the life. By living a self restraint life. By seeing the God in every living being in the world.
Best non-fiction opening that sounds like a threat.
Wait, I read this! Can't remember the name of the book right now though.
Edit: Ok, I remember it from a screenshot in a thread about cheeky textbooks
Yeah, it's an oldie.
Fun fact, Boltzmann hung himself while Ehrenfest shot his 15 year old son and then himself.
You and I go to different parties
Came looking for this, thanks
This one tops my list, probably followed by the opening to hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy.
it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer
Neil Gaiman makes a reference to that in Neverwhere, using 'TV tuned to a dead channel' to describe a cloudless blue sky.
Lovely books, horrible human being, apparently. Such a shame
Never turn people into heroes, it's an unearned pedestal. People who create works of art are expressing their ideals not their reality.
Separate the art from the artist, and if you do not wish to enrich the artist, then torrent their works
Which is why I only own one Gaiman book, and even that was a gift. Even streaming music made by cunts feels bad nowadays.. but I remind myself that there's thousands others out there.. so I just block the cunts and move on. (Black metal especially has quite a bit of nazis, unfortunately)
My approach is similar, but I limit it to living people. Once they've passed it's unlikely much of anything will come to light in the future that changes one's perspective
I need to read that one of these days
It is a great book and the other two in the trilogy are just as good. I'm going through all of Gibson's works right now. Currently in Agency and loving it.
It's a trilogy? I didn't know that. Cool!
A very loose trilogy. They don't follow the same characters, not really. The world is the same, as are the themes.
Id recommend the great "johnny mnemonic" short story first. It introduces a character you will see again.
Alright that was really good, thank you for sharing it with me!!
Alright, thanks!
I've been waiting for the third book in the Jackpot trilogy for what feels like a decade. I hope he finishes it soon.
Just starting his Jackpot trilogy. I watched the series, they canceled it just as it was getting good. Wonder if that has anything to do with the incomplete books.
I believe that the show was cancelling due to a combination of the writers/actors strike and Amazon just having a nagging tendency to cancel expensive shows. The Peripheral does stray from the books a bit, but it was so good. The cancelling of their good shows and their bullshit extra fee to not see ads made me just stop watching Prime Video completely.
The books are excellent though, super excited about the last book (whenever it comes out). They are my favorite books of his since the Sprawl trilogy (aka Neuromancer books).
The characters were great, and the cast worked well, too. Second season people had settled in to their roles and it flowed better. Especially liked Alexandra Billings’ Lowbeer. That androgyny and smiling threat with presence brought to the character was awesome.
I read it ages ago and enjoyed it immensely. Its influence on everything cyberpunk is clear.
I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'
I should really read that book again.
Didn't enjoy it myself
Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files
Creepy weirdo that writes copaganda but damned if that sequence doesn't slap.
Doesn't Dresden frequently have problems with the cops?
But there's like 2 good cops, so it must be copaganda.
Out of how many?
Well, the action happens in Chicago. And there's a special investigations unit that's not very respected as far as I can remember(it's a sort of dead end job that nobody wants) that he deals with and there's a couple of good cops and a couple of bad cops there. For all the rest, the books keep mentioning how he doesn't trust other cops, how many of them are in the pockets of mobsters and other villains, etc. There's even corrupt fbi agents as antagonists in the second book.
Which is a very American mindset that is built upon our sense of "freedom".
The bad guy is a bad cop. Bad cops exist. But the cavalry (in this case, Murphy and her partner and Butters and Michael and so forth) are the good cops. Because, when the chips are down, the real heroic cops come to help.
It is much more prevalent in military fiction because... ACAB is a common phrase for a reason. One of the best examples is the Bradley Cooper A-Team movie (also a really fun movie). On its surface? The villain is a rogue CIA officer (also maybe a rogue general? Been a minute). But throughout the entire movie we have the titular team regularly talk about how much they learned in the military and Rocket Raccoon can't help but want to bang the hell out of the good military cop who both wants to capture them AND wants to know the truth. And, when the chips are down, she is there to save the day.
Its one of those things you don't pick up on until you do a lot of reading... or think about why The Military is so willing to allow the use of men and material in filming. If they weren't okay with the idea of a rogue officer then they would have refused the use of IFVs and so forth. PLENTY of movies end up stuck using stock footage because of that.
But no. It is very much the extension of "a few bad apples don't ruin the bunch" that is used to handwave evil shit that cops (and the military) does.
Butcher isn't the only writer who does that shit. But it is one of those things where "So... does he realize he is doing it?" up until the "cops are the light in the darkness" wank fest during The Battle of Chicago (I forgot which book).
It is up to you whether you care or not. I semi-recently rambled about/glazed a movie that I outright consider CCP propaganda that stars "The Tom Cruise of Hong Kong". And... I will watch basically any Donnie Yen movie because he is just that charismatic and physically magnificent. But I also make it a point to think through WHY specific roles were chosen or specific dialogue was spoken even as I am cheering on him fighting his way out of essentially a favela.
I would say, up until the hiatus, it was very much the "Not All Cops Are Bastards" kind of work. Murphy (who was apparently the insert of Butcher's now ex-wife) is obvious but even her partner mostly is just "guilty" of thinking this weird PI who knows things he shouldn't and is constantly seen talking with criminals might not be on the up and up. Same with Morgan (? Harry's magic parole officer) who mostly was just depicted as so focused on justice and the danger of black magic that he didn't trust the guy who had previously used black magic and who is canonically going to go REAL fucking dark later.
And Michael et al are VERY cop adjacent.
But things really shifted once Harry became a magic cop himself. The "I am opposed to authority but damn if I don't look good with a badge" kind of story.
Then we had the hiatus and came back to The Battle of Chicago where Butcher spent a full chapter worshiping cops and talking about how they are the literal light in the darkness.
Which is pretty consistent with a lot of copaganda (also military propaganda). The idea that there are bad eggs but by and large they are great and here is this godlike human being that also happens to be a cop. Think "Dirty Harry" or a LOT of Donnie Yen movies.
Contrast that with someone like a Richard Kadrey who makes it an entire plot point that one of the big bads is a cop who is literally protected by police unions and qualified immunity (also there is zero chance that Richard Kadrey doesn't have hundreds of pages of very explicit Sonic OC fan fiction. And I say that as a compliment).
And on the "weirdo" note: Let's just say it is a very open secret who Lara Raithe is "inspired by". Although many women in the publishing and convention organizing community have stories of being compared to her... And everyone tries not to think too hard who Molly (Harry's best friend's daughter that he knew almost her entire life who just can't stop throwing her tight naked body at Harry...) is.
Who inspired Lara ? Tried to look it up but I can't find anything.
Damn, I really don't have an original thought in my head
The more we communicate in memes and pop culture references, the closer we get to going full Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
Di'caprio, his finger pointing
Redford, when the mountain man nodded
– Jason Pargin, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits
Speaking of Iain m banks, the paragraph about an outside context problem is one of my favourite openings he's done. "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop"
Some beautiful turns of phrase throughout. Maybe I should revisit these now that I'm less worried about missing out on something, so I can just browse and skip around.
He was a big fan of the power of the first line. You can really see it in a lot of his books.
His last ever book started with
"The two craft met within the blast-shadow of the planetary fragment called Ablate, a narrow twisted scrue of rock three thousand kilometres long and shaped like the hole in a tornado."
Or maybe it's the second para. I haven't got my copy on me. But I memorised the last bit on the spot.
Yeah I haven't read that one in a while
My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:
Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"
And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"
I especially like that line in Neuromancer because at the time he wrote it, his audience would've understood he meant TV snow. Meaning the sky was overcast, giving a gloomy mood. But younger people now will think of that featureless blue that modern TVs use, which indicates a beautiful cloudless day. Totally different mood!
Young people today will be puzzled by the TV scenes in Poltergeist as well. Time and tech marches on...
absolute classic, came here to post it.
Went into this comment section with Kafkas "Metamorphosis" in mind, I love the opening, the whole story is genius and to this day perfectly describes large parts of German society.
All three quotes are great, how you can captivate a reader just with one sentence, all three do this perfectly.
The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.
All too many have forgotten the face of their fathers...
This is my favorite opening hook of all time.
Tells you everything you need to know about what you're about to read. Uhh, kinda.
This is my favorite opening line:
He may know how to start a book but he can't end one to save his life.
His older books ended pretty well IMO. It was only the later books where they sometimes make a major turn near the end and get nuts. I sometimes enjoy the craziness of it, but Seveneves was particularly jarring.
I disagree, cryptonomicon's ending just comes out of left field with the introduction of a new character at the end of the book.
I honestly couldn't finish it.
It changed from an excellent comedy at the start, to a spy thriller, to a war action movie and then to some kind of tech-startup biography.
Insane changes in pace. Did I miss a good ending then? I've got about 20% left.
I like to believe that his editor told him that enough was enough and that we had to end the damn book. And, if it was not for the editor he would still be writing the book, not not revising it, just making it longer and longer.
Haha he could have just written three to five books instead.
Fair point, I forgot about cryptonomicon's ending. I guess Stephenson has been pulling this forever.
I want to love his books, he build such interesting worlds and stories, but the ending disappoints almost every time
I absolutely get you. I do enjoy his books, mostly because they tend to center around a really great premise and are entertaining enough that I can not let the bad parts ruin it for me.
That book was a slog. Took forever to get to the inevitable you knew was going to happen, glossed over the worldbuilding, and ended it just as things got interesting.
Maybe it's an adaptation of a Hotblack Desiato song.
Disaster Area's songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.
Thanks for the reminder to get back on the waiting list at my library. I’ve been trying on and off for years to read this
I really do recommend it. Just know that the end is basically a separate novella, that is completely different in tone. I would suggest giving it some time at the least before you read the last of it at the least.
I absolutely love the opening of The Martian by Andy Weir
I just reread that and Project Hail Mary, because I finally read Artemis and needed more Andy Weir. That man tickles exactly the right part of my brain.
Now I’m onto the Bobiverse series and loving it.
I did that on a slightly different order, yes. But those are other books I'd recommend after reading the Martian.
It's a bit different, but do you know the short story "The Egg" of Andy Weir?
No! I saw it listed somewhere but I didn’t read it. Is it good?
Very short and available online, so... Take 5 mins and see for yourself:
https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
Kurzgesagt also made a short animation "movie" for it: https://youtu.be/h6fcK_fRYaI
That’s beautiful.
Tried The Murderbot Diaries? Can't put my finger on it, but the series pairs nicely with the Bobiverse.
I haven’t yet, but it’s been suggested to me ever since I read the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, so it’s on my list.
I can't get into his writing. I like his stories, but his prose is always bubbling with this unearned enthusiasm that doesn't let the reader actually feel what they want to feel about a situation ("this is so cool!" okay, I guess I should feel happy this...). Plus his characters are all essentially interchangeable with maybe one or two tacked on characteristics that desperately scream "look at me, I'm quirky!" You always have the impression that he's just using his characters as props to accelerate the plot, and once they're off the page they're essentially waiting in stasis to be called back into action.
Contrast this style of writing to Ann Leckie's SciFi writing, where characters are defined largely by their actions and spoken word is a luxury used to deliver cutting statements that give insights into the rich tapestry of culture, where you're not even aware of their physical characteristics such as gender or number of limbs, because they ultimately do not matter and they let you the reader form your own idea and own opinion of the scene taking place in front of you.
He doesn't hint at a wider world, he just outright states exactly what's happening in any given scene, and I guess I just find that somewhat lazy/insulting
Well, not the first line per se, but the first chapter of Snowcrash is easily one of my favorites ever.
If I had to pick an opening like though, it would be:
"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."
If it's not already trivia you know, apparently Tolkien just wrote that line on a piece of paper one day and just built the story around it.
Hopefully it's not apocryphal.
That's cool, I hope it's true 😆 I heard he basically told the story to his kids and formalized it later, but either way that's a great origin.
Snow Crash really has fallen off the radar. Really ignited my interest in cyberpunk when I read it 30+ years ago.
It's terrifying how familiar a lot of his world feels nowadays.
Yeah, absolutely. That and Jennifer Government. We’re getting all the shitty dystopian aspects of cyberpunk without all the cool technological advances.
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." Stephen King
One of the most perfect shortest stories ever written, shame there were no sequels
Personally I think the first three novels are very strong and the fourth a good prequel too. It goes off the rails after that one though, like a crazy chu chu train so to speak.
I like them as standalone King stories, but hated how he tried to marry all his works (and others works...) into his ill-defined ego-centric universe.
I liked the last chapter of the last book as a continuation of the Gunslinger
I didn't mind the connection between other books all that much, but the self-insertion, Dr. Dooms and Harry Potter snitches were a bit much and almost felt like parody.
don't forget spiderman!
I don't remember any Spiderman references, unless you're thinking of Mordred.
was that the spider boy at the end, who added nothing to the overall plot?
Talk about a hook! I can think of 5 obvious questions the reader will have from that simple sentence.
I don’t think it’s technically the very first line in the book, but The Way of Kings’ “Szeth-son-son-Vallano, Truthless of Shinovar, wore white on the day he was to kill a king.” still gives me chills.
Other than the epigraph for the prologue, it is sort of the first line of the book. Because the part about Kalak is the “Prelude to the Stormlight Archive,” and after that the book says “Book One \n The Way of Kings” and then goes on to the prologue.
Yeah and I'll admit the Kalak bit didn't pull me in super well, in a way very reminiscent of the plantation scene of mistborn
That’s understandable. It worked on me though. I was convinced Taln was going to want revenge. 🤣
Yeah i think the thing that gets me is that he likes to drop a lot of fantasy proper nouns at the same time in both those openings. There are ten heralds and this scene is so important it's only fitting to happen there. And I think in a visual medium it might've gotten me better, or maybe had I been reading instead of doing the audio book.
I stand by the kelsier plantation scene being a worse opening than just starting with Vin though
Oh yeah that was an excellent opener! Absolutely glues your nose to the book.
I love how it slowly changes in emotional tone the further you get in the series but it hits hard enough you remember the line.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I also really like the Bridget Jones' Diary homage to this by Helen Fielding
I don't care about the book, it's contents nor its attitude, but in terms of summing up the tone of a book, it does a hell of a good job.
Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:
Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.
Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.
The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.
And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least take a hurried snack out of anything bigger.
And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap… And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle. And then the eagle lets go.
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
I like "The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth the effort." from The Light Fantastic
Which early Prachett book starts with a guru or wizard obtaining enlightenment then asking his apprentice "go on ask me any question I have observed everything and know it all!" the appretice asked him what he wants for breakfast "ah, one of the difficult ones"
Thief of time
Definitely an upper quartile Pratchett.
Thank you,
'Ah,' he said. 'One of the difficult ones.'
There's good eatin' on those things!
I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.
Fear and loathing in las vegas
I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife's grave. Then, I joined the army.
Ah damn how did I forget this one?! One of my absolute favorite books!
I ugly laughed a lot when I read it the first time.
"Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out."
-John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
1984
The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off
It reads like poetry to me
"The small boys came early to the hanging."
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
On hold at the library now, wow.
The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.
Other than the very shocking gang bang scene it's a great novel.
Wait, what? Missed that one, should probably re-read.
Between, um, Beverly and all the boys.
not worth reading for that one, friend
Came here to post this. Just re-reading the books, finished Drawing yesterday. I'm already so in love with the characters again. Will, once more, be heartbroken by Wizard & Glass. Despite all the shortcomings of the final books, this is just the best King ever wrote. (And I would really love to read the versions of 5, 6 and 7 from the parallel reality where King didn't have the accident. But who knows, maybe he'd never finished the story without it.)
Yeah, King's endings tend to be a little messy and narratively unsatisfying sometimes. Gunslinger is easily my favorite of the series and just about every other thing he's written. On my last read through the story, I started with my original copy of The Gunslinger, then read through the rest of the series (reading the disconnected but related stories just before the final book), and finished with the revised edition of The Gunslinger.
I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, "it was a dark and stormy night." There's a reason it became cliche. It's very evocative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulwer-Lytton_Fiction_Contest
Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.
"This is not the beginning. But it is a beginning".
Absolutely love these!
If everything is transient, does that apply to transience itself as well?
Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
Why'd you stop halfway through?
Poor googling.
Is this sarcasm? I think if it stopped at the first dichotomy, or the second it would be fine. But it goes on for fucking ever.
If that wore you out, probably should stay away from Dickens.
Oh yes. I hate Dickens. Absolutely can't stand him.
Well I like it.
I am happy for you in that, a little surprised. But good for you!
Kinda the point. It's supposed to drill into your head how everything in that period was taken to the extremes by taking the prose itself to the extremes.
not all prose has to be prosaic
Pretty good book that doesn't feel imo as old as it is
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
One of the most beautifully written novels I've ever read.
Beautiful. Have you read Steven Millhouse? If you like GGM I think you'll like him.
No I haven't - is there a particular book you'd recommend?
He won a Pulitzer for the novel Martin Dressler but I haven't read it. His short stories, however, are fantastic. The Barnum Museum is maybe the best collection? I'm not sure. Read Eisenheim the Illusionist. They made a kinda shitty movie that has nothing to do with it starring Paul Giamatti
Thank you someone had to post this one.
Title?
One of the Dresden File books, I forget which one it was sadly.
Blood Rites, Jim Butcher
Thank you!!
HA! I picked up a Dresden file book and dismissed it almost right out of hand a few years ago (can't remember why), but maybe I should revisit.
The first 2 books are considered the weakest, even by the writer. The community suggests the 3rd book is a good entry point.
Sounds like the start to Fahrenheit 451
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Oh I keep meaning to read this one!
A Prayer For Owen Meany
-- John Irving
Irving could really put a sentence together holy shit.
words to live by
Dictionary?
Certainly a line with current behind it.
It does lend itself to a power of sorts
I remember finding a Shadow Warrior novel (based on the video game) and I only remember how it opened because it was batshit insane. Lo Wang is at a restaurant trying to decide what to get weighing the pros and cons of getting some fish thing that he knows would give him major gas and he didn't want to upset some woman he was going to be with latwr by stinking up the joint, when a bunch of the big bad's ninjas show up and try to kill him. He easily kills them all, and at one point cuts one of their noses off and flicks it into the bowl of soup another patron looking on in horror had ordered, while Wang thinks to himself that guy is gonna take the nose home to show his children and tell the story about how Lo Wang stopped a bunch of evil ninjas.
I read this in high school and even as a teen who loved that shit, I thought it was cringe af. Like a wild fanfic you'd find on a blog or forum. Yet I paid money for it in a book.
Found it. For Dead Eyes Only.
It's a shame the rest of the book must have been boring compared to this, since I do not remember anything else. I wish I still had it. But I'm assuming it was pretty easy to find, considering you got the whole chunk of it I was thinking of and my description didn't even do it justice. 🤣
The nose bit was just so... extra. It's one of those things that sticks with you.
Tbf, Shadow Warrior in general has always struck me like that. Ridiculously over the top to the point of being cringe, but it's so clearly intentional it circles back to being funny. To me at least.
Scaramouche, by Rafael Sabatini
But will he do the Fandango?
Thunderbolts and lightning
"Call me Ishmael" has always been my favorite
…Fone Bone?
That voice... It just droned on and on... and on! It was horrible.
Moby Dick
The first line of Shirley Jackson's Haunting Of Hill House is a banger, the complete first paragraph is incredible.
Spooky, I'm gonna add this to my list for this month. I like to make sure I get some spook in Oct.
Ive long found something amusing about Seveneves's opening line being "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason".
"A screaming comes across the sky." -Gravity's Rainbow
A great opening, but it has hands down one of the best endings I have ever read.
I'm kinda partial to this.
New Pynchon novel tomorrow!
The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.
— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North
Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.
I knew I loved reading but it made me want to read even more. You're welcome!
"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."
Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.
“Ba-room, ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - good.”
Katherine Paterson, Bridge to Terabithia
(The context turns out to be the protagonist listening to his dad start the truck and drive away.)
One that always stayed with me is from a coming-of-age story:
If you're curious, here's the rest of the first chapter which really ties the first sentence together nicely:
Huh, actually a rather good summary of Godel's Theorom. Cool.
Jeez that's good.
“So… You’ll cut my head off.” I raised an eyebrow at the salescritter. I was baiting him. I knew it, he knew it, I knew he knew it.
We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor
Honestly it doesn't do the series justice, but it's still a standout.
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
An evocative one which has stayed with me: “I had barely regained the ability to walk. I could not chase women, but could slowly make my way up the stairs to the whorehouse.”
I can’t remember where it’s from. Perhaps Bukowski or one of his contemporaries?
Late to the party, but:
The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor
I went looking for it and found only a book of the same name written by William Harwar Parker, in 1864.
https://archive.org/details/elementsofseaman00park/mode/1up
It's less entertaining...
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-elements-of-seamanship-seamanship-series_roger-c-taylor/592502/#edition=701339&idiq=5483159
Haha thanks I found it eventually but it was some entertaining confusion in the meantime
I guess I now know what my Dad is getting for his birthday...
-Bradbury, Kaleidoscope
Call me Ishmael.
One of the all time greats.
“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit
I saw my first goblin the same day I saw my first shipwreck.
I was under sail, on my way to war. On my way to fall in love with death, and with a queen.
On my way to lose all of my friends, and two of my brothers.
I would see a great city fall in blood and fire, betrayed by a false god.
Later, I would be commanded to die on a high stone bridge, but I would fail in this.
The rest of the First Lanza of His Majesty’s Corvid Knights would not fail.
This is not a happy story, but it is a true one.
I have no time for lies, or for liars.
And yes, Corvid Knights are as badass as you think. Maybe more.
I'm getting so many good recommendations and I'm so happy I posted this.
I went scrabbling through my lending library to find good stuff when I saw this.
I love these posts.
If you want recommendations, let me know a few things you loved and I'll send more your way!
I'm a massive quality snob so you'll get no low-grade prose in anything I send you.
Please do!
I've put loads of stuff in the thread but what I'm saying is let me know a couple of books you've enjoyed and then I can narrow it down a bit.
Before you read The Daughters War check out The Blacktongue Thief. And if you like that, I'd also recommend Between Two Fires. Christopher Buehlman is fantastic.
Holy shit, what a great way to find out there's a prequel to the Blacktongue Thief. Which also fits in this thread.
Buehlman has an incredible way with words and with giving characters an absolutely unique narrative voice.
If you can do the audiobook version of Daughters War, I'd highly recommend it.
The reader is super charismatic and is a woman with some kind of latin accent that fits the tone and mood of the viewpoint characters so well.
It's like being at a poetry reading in postwar Spain.
The first line of James Ellroy's LA Confidential is what immediately moved me from solely reading fantasy and sci-fi as a young man and opened the door a world of hard-boiled crime that would go on to include the classics like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
There's something about Ellroy's clipped, staccatto writing rhythm (he calls it "shotgun prose") that grabbed me from the very first moment.
This is the story of a bloodstained boy. There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. - Railsea, China Mieville.
One I've recently re-read. Not quite as catchy as some of the others here, but manages to capture the world and mood of the setting remarkably well in just one sentence.
Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.
-John Dies at the End
And my personal favorite...
I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.
-The Unnoticeables
“Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” -- Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Really, that whole first chapter is incredible. One of those rare books where the first chapter is so compelling that you just have to keep on reading.
"My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973." the lovely bones
From The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemison
The dedications are good too. As are the entire books, go read them. The dedications in respective order:
Let's go with something more somber.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
-Lolita by Nabokov
It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.
And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.
Wow does that ever make me shiver, and not in a good way. Imagine saying that about a CHILD.
His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit.
Lord of Light Roger Zelazny
"West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."
In Germany, "Ilsebill salzte nach." ("Ilsebill added more salt.") from the novel The Flounder, written by author Günter Grass, has been voted the best opening line of all time.
yum
"Somebody warned them that we were coming. The sympathisers left nothing behind but an empty apartment and a few volumes of illegal verse."
The following lines are even better in terms of raw world building but it's an excellent open.
From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday's autobiography.
I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:
Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.
We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.
This is really beautiful. Is the book available in translation?
Yes, there seems to be an English translation. Maybe if someone has it they can post the odficial English translation.
"When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there."
From The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso.
It's the opening like, the closing line and everything in between.
Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.
Was her family literally named after her ass?
riverrun
That's me, you may wonder how I got there...
On second thought, it may not work so well in books, unless they're illustrated novels (or comics, as we used to call them, even though they weren't all that funny).
“I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinns, set eyes on Maud the wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of aristocrats and paupers, just as the great courtesan, Magdalena Colon, also known as La Ultima, a woman whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her across the river’s icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes’ gold and yielded without fee to Diogenes the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.”
Quinn's Book by William Kennedy
"His name was Remo..."
David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”
Haha someone named him Eustace!
I managed to finish that series with my son but daaaang is it weirdly religious.
Well it's meant to be. I like it regardless.
I did not. It was better in the beginning, a subtle allegory, but got weirder and more in your face with each book.
The only redeeming factor for me was Reepicheep.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one halfway over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.
-- "Titus Groan" by Mervin Peake
It's a mood.
How Many People In This World Know The Aim Of Human Birth As Defined By God?
This is one of great opening line which I know: The holy book Geeta, which is the direct voice of God for the entire humanity irrespective of any religion or nationality, says that human birth has been graced by God to break the cycle of millions of birth and deaths since infinite time, and to get escaped from this world forever and achieve the Supreme.
How To Achieve The Aim Of Human Life? By chanting God's name constantly and meditatively along with all our righteous deeds selflessly throughout the life. By living a self restraint life. By seeing the God in every living being in the world.