Things I Like - Books

I know that Tuesday's are supposed to be Art, but I am switching out with Thursday this week since I have some Christmas themed Art. So today is Books - no connection to Christmas...

I ran across an interesting link the other day - the American Book Review put out a list of the 100 Best First Lines from Novels. There was no discussion of how the list was put together but a link on the site titled 'Nominated Best Last Lines from Novels' indicates that there was some reader input to the list. Regardless, it was interesting to read through - I've copied the first 10 below:

100 Best First Lines from Novels

1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. 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. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. 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 (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

And no, that wasn't a typo on #7, that's just Joyce.

This got me to thinking about great novels and whether or not there was any correlation between a great first line and the novel as a whole. There are plenty of lists out there of the Top 100 Novels - some put out by publishers, some by magazines or papers and others are based on user recommendations. I also found a list that consolidates 10 different Top 100 lists (see the link below for the complete list as well as a description of the methodology used to compile). This seemed like a good source for checking out the First Line / Great Novel connection. The first 10 novels from this list were:

Best 100 Novels

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four / George Orwell
2. The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck
4. The Catcher in the Rye / J.D. Salinger
5. Catch-22 / Joseph Heller
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. Gone With the Wind / Margaret Mitchell
8. Ulysses / James Joyce
9. On The Road / Jack Kerouac
10. The Lord of the Rings / J.R.R. Tolkien

A quick comparison of the lists shows that 2 of the novels with a Top 10 First Line made the top 10 on the Novel list. If you look at the next 10 novels, you pick up another 3 First Line winners. What's more interesting is that the authors of the top 10 First Lines represent 9 of the top 20 novels.

You always hear about writers agonizing over the opening line to their novel - it seems they know what they're doing.

http://americanbookreview.org/100BestLines.asp
http://neilbowers.wordpress.com/2008/07/27/a-unified-list-of-the-best-100-novels/