From: word_chemist@hotmail.com   
      
   The following is the 100 best opening lines to novels, according to   
   something called the American Book Review out of Uni. of Illinois.   
   As you might imagine from a university, there's a load of old crap included   
   for all sorts of reasons other than literary merit pomo, magic real.   
   multiculturalism (that fucking bore/mountebank/charlatan Pynchon at #3! Toni   
   Morrison: '124 was spiteful' and NO:   
      
   'London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in   
   Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets   
   as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it   
   would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so,   
   waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down   
   from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as   
   big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the   
   death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better;   
   splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's   
   umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold   
   at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have   
   been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke),   
   adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points   
   tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.'   
      
   George, is however, in the top ten. Note to whom it may concern: this thread   
   would liven up Lost Horizon:   
      
      
   100 best first lines from novels   
   By American Book Review   
   Friday, February 03, 2006   
      
      
   Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by   
   the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for   
   Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University:   
      
   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)   
      
   11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in   
   trouble?-Do-you-need-advice?-Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-yo   
   u) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. - Nathanael   
   West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)   
      
   12. 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. -Mark Twain, Adventures   
   of Huckleberry Finn (1885)   
      
   13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having   
   done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. -Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925;   
   trans. Breon Mitchell)   
      
   14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a   
   winter's night a traveler. -Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler   
   (1979; trans. William Weaver)   
      
   15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. -Samuel   
   Beckett, Murphy (1938)   
      
   16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably   
   want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and   
   how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David   
   Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want   
   to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)   
      
   17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming   
   down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met   
   a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. - James Joyce, A Portrait of the   
   Artist as a Young Man (1916)   
      
   18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good   
   Soldier (1915)   
      
   19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they   
   were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when   
   they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they   
   were then doing;-that not only the production of a rational Being was   
   concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of   
   his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;-and, for aught   
   they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take   
   their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:-Had   
   they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,-I am   
   verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world,   
   from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Laurence Sterne,   
   Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)   
      
   20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that   
   station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. - Charles   
   Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)   
      
   21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of   
   lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. - James Joyce, Ulysses   
   (1922)   
      
   22. 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 house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps   
   that struggled against the darkness. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul   
   Clifford (1830)   
      
   23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party   
   whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that   
   she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)