Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The previously unvisited (by me) blog "Michael Bérubé Online" reports on an upcoming compilation of "Great First Lines in Novels." He's careful not to provide a link to the list itself, presumably out of deference to the orderliness of the process. But he does supply some of the selections so far, and solicits other nominees.

So far they have over 150 nominations, and many of them are what you’d expect:

Call me Ishmael.

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.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

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.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

But there are a few surprises and flights of whimsy, as well: “It was a pleasure to burn,” from Fahrenheit 451; “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” from Beckett’s Murphy (a personal fave—the line, and the novel); and even, from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s Paul Clifford, the immortal

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.

Fun!