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Linguistically Speaking

The 100 Best First Lines of Novels

http://www.litline.org/ABR/100bestfirstlines.html

An interesting compilation - though I don't really think the Moby Dick-opening deserves the first rank, there are many others I prefer (n. 2 would certainly be among the top openings for me).

The list also makes good exam preparation - quite a lot of these books are on the reading list, so you can check how many you recognize ;-)

And as a good way to recall all the books, we could compile our own list for the exam stuff!

barbara... - 31. Jan, 20:50 3 comments - add comment

si1ja - 31. Jan, 23:51

Interesting! I agree with your remark about the order of the ranking - some of them I don't really find that exceptional, I have to say (or maybe they are only exceptional if one has read the book?). I was actually a bit surprised that not more of our books were on the list!

I think it would be fun to compile our own list - takes a lot of time, though!

barbara... - 8. Feb, 16:11

I think most of them really are exceptional only in connection with the text they 'introduce' - I really like the first sentence of The Wings of the Dove (#74), but only now I've started reading the book and think that it is very telling about the author's style and tone...
si1ja - 10. Feb, 01:48

Yeah I guess that's it. I'm sure even the most brilliant first sentence would not make it on the list if people did not like the book itself.