The First Sentence Test

This book was born as I was hungry.

So begins one of my favourite novels of all time, Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Maybe I’m a spoiled reader. A snob? I don’t know. All I know is that for an author to win me over, for the writer to make me want to take a novel home with me, s/he has got to pass the first sentence test. What sort of writer are you if you can’t write a damn good first sentence?

We all know these famous first sentences:

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. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Call me Ishmael. –Herman Melville, Moby Dick

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. – Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Don’t THESE make you want to keep reading?

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. –James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Atlas Malone saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree. –Jon Cohen, The Man in the Window

You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple

The last camel collapsed at noon. –Ken Follett, The Key to Rebecca

They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.” —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

This last one is one of the most exciting novels I have ever read. But I won’t recommend it to you unless you, like me, enjoy the bizarre, the shocking, the twisted, the twilight land between sick and rapturous.

Well, let me ask you this. Did you like Palindromes? Freaks? Luis Bunuel movies? Can you believe there might be a cult of devotees who worship freaks of nature? Yes? Then you might be ready for Geek Love.

It’s hard for me to find a new book to read when most of the books I pick up don’t meet my first criterion: a fabulous first sentence.

Here are the first sentences from all the books around me right now:

It is strange to be here. –John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Clare: It’s hard being left behind. –Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife

Every day downtown Soul City saw Huggy Bear Jackson smooth by in that pristine money-green 1983 Cadillac Cutlass Supreme custom convertible with gold rims, neon-green lights underneath, and a post-state-of-the-art Harmon Kardon system with sixteen speakers, wireless remote, thirty-disc changer, and the clearest sound imaginable. –Touré, The Portable Promised Land

Greetings, heroines, and congratulations. Jennifer Worick and Joe Borgenicht, The Action Heroine’s Handbook

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. –Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

They crouched with their rifles in the pineapple field, watching a man teach his son how to ride a horse. –Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. –Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Forêet Vierge qui s’appelait “Histoires Vécues.” Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Le Petit Prince (Avec dessins par l’auteur)

Which first sentences are in the same room with you right now?