8 First Sentences: Which Book Would You Read Next?

I sometimes pick my next read based almost solely on the first line. Am the only one who does this? I bet not. Which of these books call to you after reading their opening sentence?

Chaos by Patricia Cornwell: "Beyond the brick wall bordering Harvard Yard, four tall chimneys and a gray slate roof with white-painted dormers peek through the branches of hardwood trees." (contemporary mystery; William Morrow; November 2016)

Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister: "Like any Chicago tavern in deep summer, Joe Mulligan's stank." (historical mystery; Sourcebooks Landmark; March 2017)

The Sleeping Beauty Killer by Mary Higgins Clark & Alafair Burke: "Will the defendant please rise?" (contemporary mystery; Simon & Schuster; November 2016)

Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis: "The waters of Lake Wilhelm are dark and chilled." (contemporary suspense; Sourcebooks Landmark; January 2017)

Victoria by Daisy Goodwin: "A shaft of dawn light fell on the crack in the corner of the ceiling." (historical fiction; St. Martin's Press; November 2016)

The Homecoming by Stacie Ramey: "Standing on the high school's lacrosse field in the town I never thought I'd go back to, I wait for my turn to do the suicides." (contemporary fiction; Sourcebooks Fire; November 2016)

City of Mirrors by Melodie Johnson Howe: "Mother never owned a house." (contemporary mystery; Pegasus; 2013)

Genghis Khan and the Quest for God by Jack Weatherford: "The evening hours in a military camp belong to the revelry of the young soldiers, but the final dark hours before the sun rises belong to the old veterans, who silently stir the ashes of memory and await the light of day." (history; Viking; October 2016)

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Starting from Page 1: Six for Early Winter

The solstice is fast approaching and with it comes the official start of winter. For me, winter is the perfect season for reading through my bookshelves. As I've mentioned, one way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines to see what calls to me. Here's what I read yesterday.

Luis Alberto Urrea
Queen of America
Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown and Company, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780316154864
Fiction

At first she found it dry. Soon, and forever after, she would find it vast, dreadfully open, more sky than prairie, more prairie than mountain, more mountain than city. The whole would outstrip her ability to see, and she knew her days would end before she had seen one half of the continent and its rivers, its forests, its shores. Dry at first, then running, raining, flooding, wet. Then dry again. But now, in these days, for the first time in her life, she knew she was about to face the endless sea. The Saint of Cabora had discovered America.

Alexandra Fuller
Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Penguin Group USA / The Penguin Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781594202995
Biography

Our Mum--or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself--has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

Mark Kurlansky
The Eastern Stars
Penguin Group USA / Riverhead Books, 2010
ISBN-13: 9781594487507
Nonfiction, sports

This is a book about what is known in America as "making it." And like all such tales, it is also a story about not making it. In this Dominican town, San Pedro de Macoris, the difference between making it and not making it is usually baseball.

Maria Duenas
The Time in Between
Simon & Schuster / Atria, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781451616880
Historical fiction

A typewriter shattered my destiny. The culprit was a Hispano-Olivetti, and for weeks, a store window kept it from me. Looking back now, from the vantage point of the years gone by, it's hard to believe a simple mechanical object could have the power to divert the course of an entire life in just four short days, to pulverize the intricate plans on which it was built. And yet that is how it was, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it.

Alica Bessette
A Pinch of Love
Penguin Group USA / Plume, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780452297111
Women's fiction

I knot Nick's camouflage apron under my boobs, unable to remember the last time I wore a bra, or preheated the oven. That's my widow style.

Sara Levine
Treasure Island!!!
Europa Editions, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781609450618
Fiction

In the aftermath of my adventure, I decided to write down the whole thing, starting with my discovery of Treasure Island and keeping nothing back, not even the names of the friends and family members whose problems plagued me; and so even though I'd love to go into the other room and stab someone with a kitchen knife, I take up my pen--a nifty micro-ball which had been incorrectly capped and would have dried out had I not, at the crucial moment, found it and restored its seal.

Have any of these opening lines grabbed your attention? I have all of them on my winter reading list.

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Starting from Page 1: Six for Early Fall

Don't let the temperatures fool you; fall has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere and it's time to start thinking about indoor pursuits and long evenings devoted to reading. The quality of books coming out this season is astounding, meaning 2011 is going to end as strongly as it began.

As I've mentioned, one way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines to see what grabs me. Here's what I read yesterday.


Gail Caldwell
Let's Take the Long Way Home
Random House Trade, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780812979114
Memoir

It's an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Beth Kephart
You Are My Only
Egmont USA / Laura Geringer Books, 2011
ISGN-13: 9781606842720
Young Adult - Fiction

My house is a storybook house. A huff-and-a-puff-and-they'll-blow-it-down house. The roof is soft; it's tumbled. There are bushes growing tall past the sills. A single sprouted tree leans in from high above the cracked slate path, torpedoing acorns to the ground.

Anne Enright
The Forgotten Waltz
W. W. Norton, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780393072556
Fiction

If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive. Not that there is anything to forgive, of course, but the fact that a child was mixed up in it all made us feel that there was no going back; that it mattered. The fact that a child was affected meant we had to face ourselves properly, we had to follow through.

Brian O'Reilly
Angelina's Bachelors
Simon & Schuster / Gallery, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781451620566
Fiction

"Perfect," whispered Angelina.

Standing alone in the moonlit warmth of her kitchen, she stroked them each softly in turn and applied the slightest, knowing pressure to each. They were cool to the touch now, all risen to exactly the same height, the same shape and consistency, laid side by side by side on the well-worn wooden table. The dusky scent of dark chocolate lingered in the air and on her fingers.

Greg Olear
Fathermucker
HarperCollins / William Morrow, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780062059710
Fiction

Fatherhood is fear. Fatherhood is disappointment. Fatherhood is anger and envy and lust. And the surest guarantee of fatherly success is a Spock-like mastery of those base emotions. Mister Spock, not Doctor.

Eleanor Henderson
Ten Thousand Saints
HarperCollins / Ecco, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780062021021
Fiction

"Is it dreamed?" Jude asked Teddy. "Or dreamt?"

Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy's life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas. If you were to spy them from above, between the slats of the bleachers--or smoking behind the school gym, or sliding their skateboards down the stone wall by the lake--you might confuse one for the other. But Teddy was the dark-haired one, Jude the redhead.

From the opening lines, which of these would you read first? I haven't yet decided.

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Starting from Page 1: Six for Late Summer

August is half over, and in the United States that means it's time to squeeze in a few more days of freedom before the kids go back to school and to scramble to finish all those warm-weather projects you never did get around to doing.

I was looking over the barely touched stack of books that I was sure I was going to read this summer and realized I will likely never find time to read every book that calls to me. As I mentioned earlier this summer, one way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines to see what grabs me. Here's what I read yesterday.

Sally Goldenbaum
The Wedding Shawl
Penguin / New American Library
ISBN-13: 9780451233196
Cozy mystery

It would be a night of murder, they'd been told. And there'd be lemon squares, too.

Joanna Briscoe
You
Bloomsbury, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781608194834
Fiction

It's haunted, she thought.

They emerged from the lanes on to the upper reaches of the moor, and Cecilia understood that the baby girl was still there: there in the sodden cloud shadows, there in the bracken.

Amanda Kyle Williams
The Stranger You Seek
Random House / Bantam, 2011
Thriller

The sun had not even burned dew off the grass under the live oaks, but the air was thick and soupy already, air you could swim around in, and it was dead-summer hot.

Inside the car she had not yet noticed parked on her street, a patient hunter dabbed at a trickle of perspiration and watched as Westmore Drive began a sleepy jog toward midweek.

Jeff Hirsch
The Eleventh Plague
Scholastic Press, 2011
Young adult dystopian

I was sitting at the edge of clearing, trying not to stare at the body on the ground in front of me. Dad had said we'd be done before dark, but it had been hours since the sun had gone down and he was still only waist deep in the hole, throwing shovelfuls of dirt over his shoulder.

Leila Cobo
Tell Me Something True
Hachette / Grand Central, 2009
ISBN-13: 9780446519366
Fiction

The air feels sweet and moist and just the slightest bit warm when you get off the 9 p.m. flight to Cali. It clings to your skin, but in the faintest, most tenuous way, like the sheerest of gauze blouses touching but not touching your arms as you breathe.

Jacques Strauss
The Dubious Salvation of Jack V.
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN-13: 9780374144128
Fiction

When I was eleven I was too old to cry in front of my friends, but not too old to fake a stomachache at a sleepover if I was suddenly overcome with homesickness because my friend's mother and made mutton stew and prayed before the meal and bought no-name-brand toothpaste that tasted funny.

From the opening lines, which of these would you read first? I haven't yet decided.

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Starting from Page 1: Six Summer Picks

It's July 4, which is American Independence Day and thus a day for being with friends and family, grilling, being outside, and watching fireworks. Yesterday, I was thinking about what I might want to read today and on all the warm summer days and evenings of the coming months.

Although some of the books I plan to read in the next eight weeks won't be published until later in the fall, I wanted to tell you about a half dozen titles that are out now or will be by the end of August. One way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines, and I love it when bloggers share the first sentence or two of their current book. Here's what I read this morning.

Karen White
The Beach Trees
Penguin / New American Library, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780451233073
Fiction

Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.

Craig Nova
Brook Trout and the Writing Life
Eno Publishers, 2011 (new edition)
ISBN-13: 9780982077146
Outdoor writing / essays

Often the connection between things is not obvious to the eye, and even when it is, it can take years, if not decades, for me to see just what is associated with what. The events of my life and brook trout often meet at the line of demarcation between the world of the fish and the world of the fisherman, between the seen and the unseen.

Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Language of Flowers
Random House / Ballantine, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780345525543
Fiction

For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake.

Darin Strauss
Half a Life
Random House, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780812982534
Memoir

Half my life ago, I killed a girl.

I had just turned eighteen, and when you drive in new post-adolescence, you drive with friends.

Amy Hatvany
Best Kept Secret
Simon & Schuster / Washington Square Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781439193310
Fiction

Being drunk in front of your child is right up there on the Big Bad No-No List of Motherhood. I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew it with every glass, every swallow, every empty bottle thrown into the recycle bin. I hated drinking. I hated it . . . and I couldn't stop.

Christie Watson
Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away
The Other Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781590514665
Fiction

Father was a loud man. His voice entered a room before he did. From my bedroom window I could hear him sitting in the wide gardens, or walking to the car parking area filled with Mercedes, or standing by the security guard's office or the gate in front.

From the opening lines, which of these would you read first? I'm not sure where to begin.

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