First Line Friday: On the Road

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but today’s first line is, in my opinion, kind of a stinker, even though it leads into one of my favorite books. The first two lines, as a matter of fact, are bits of back story we don’t really need, and that don’t figure in the rest of the novel. But that third line , now, that third line is great. If you ask me, it is the rightful heir to the first line throne. And if I were Kerouac’s editor, I would have lopped off the first two and made that one my opener:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off.”

What do you think? Am I off here? Of course I'm not...

Another Month in the Can

Over the weekend our staff worked to diligently put another month into the Shelf Actualization archives. Above are the authors covered in the past 30 days, and below are our 5 most popular posts from that period:

• A Ramling Riff on Rememberence in Swann’s Way
• Short Story Club: “How the Devil Came Down Division Street”
• Author Look-Alikes Vol. 13
• (Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel
• WhatThey Were Reading: Clive James

Finally, the nutty search terms that brought readers this way:

• Edward Hirsch  >>  A basketball poem for tourney time.
• Delta Wedding  >>  The review, or the Paul Simon lyrics
• How to write like Kerouac  >>  Easier than you would think
• White whale metaphor  >>  And a little Three Amigos for good measure
• Significance of the dog in vast hell  >>  Search me. But the story was good.
• Arthur miller and Eudora welty  >>  Was there a connection? Hmmm.
• How are they alike Grapes of Wrath and Cry the Beloved Country  >>  It's the intercalary chapters, stupid.
• Fictional geography  >>  That didn't end up being fictional
• Map of don quixote’s travels  >>  Ours are as good as anything out there.
• Is being unathletic bad?   >>  Well, it worked for Joyce.

Thanks for stopping by! You’re always welcome back.

(Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel, by Jay Pritchett and Manny Delgado

I’m a big fan of meta fiction. I love stories about writers and their stories. Movies like “Barton Fink” or books like Slaughterhouse Five  always seem to hit home. We’ve looked at fictional tidbits of fiction on Mad Men, and on Wednesday night’s episode of Modern Family (Career Day), Jay Pritchett and stepson Manny Delgado revealed their own dreams of penning the great American novel—or at least a compelling spy thriller—and we got a taste of what they came up with. Here are their first lines, in case you missed them:

Jay’s opener:

“Chuck Stone, six foot three inches of steely-eyed determination, sat at the interrogation table.”

Manny’s opener:

“Chuck Stone smiled and lit a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world, when, in fact, the world was about to end.”

And as a bonus, Manny’s final lines, which served as the episode-ending voiceover:

“We all weave a web of lies. Some we tell to try to help the ones we love, some we tell to try to fool ourselves, and some we tell because when you’re out of bullets and staring down the barrel of a Kalashnikov, the only weapon you’ve got left is guile.”

Love it.

Another Month in the Can

We only covered about 20 different authors this month, but since we only post about twenty times in a month, that’s not too shabby- especially considering the huge, heaping helpings of Heller we heaved upon you. Here are the top 5 posts from the past thirty days:

• Slovene Literature, Geopolitics and Video Games, oh my!
• First Line Friday: Stage Directions
• Title Chase: Catch-22
• What Bugs Me Wednesday: The War on Style
• Le Mot Juste- Without a Thesaurus

And here, as usual, are some of the nutty search terms that led people to us:

“Death in Wuthering Heights”  >>  Well, we’ve done death of  Wuthering Heights

“Death in Brave New World”  >>  Um, we killed that one off, too

“Bosch garden of earthly delights”  >>  Enjoy a profound experience of art

“Man playing video games”  >>  We’ve done exactly three posts on video games.

“Sgt. Pepper’s Album”  >>  Why yes, of course we’ve covered that.

“Beast of Burden poem”  >>  I really hope the reader got something out of this parody poem

“edith newbold jones Wharton”  >>  Ah yes, our keeping up with the Joneses post.

“8-bit ham”  >>  How about the 8-bit Fitzgerald?

“Fiction town map coloring page” >>  Well, I guess you could use this for that.

“Modern library”  >>  The famous list that we sliced and diced here.

Thanks for visiting. Keep coming back!

First Line Friday: Stage Directions

Here’s another way to open your novel: Just start throwing stage directions around. Don’t worry about giving us a verb- just start naming stuff. Describe things. Give us a flavor for the stage set.

Take the opening of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy . I read the first three or four “sentences” of this book and couldn’t find a verb that addresses any of the subjects anywhere .

“Dusk- of a summer night.

“And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants- such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.

“And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,-a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers. And with him a awoman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid….”

It’s kind of a strange effect. You feel less like a reader than you feel like a studio executive getting pitched a new movie concept. But it doesn’t have to describe setting, this kind of opening can just as easily show you what’s inside the narrator’s brain, like this classic first line from Nabokov’s Lolita :

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Nabokov’s done this elsewhere, of course. Here is the opener from Bend Sinister :

“An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”

What do you think? Do stage directions work for you? Or do you just want the author to get on with the story?

First Line Friday!

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, but I came across a good one the other night and thought it worth sharing. It’s from Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station :

“The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment, the first apartment I’d looked at after arriving in Madrid, or letting myself be woken by the noise from La Plaza Santa Ana, failing to assimilate that noise fully into my dream, then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee.”

I love this opening. Six words in and we’re already asking, “Research? What research?” After which the author completely ignores the concept of research and launches into a series of personal details that conflict with our standard assumptions about the kind of person who actually conducts serious research: he doesn’t care a wit where he lives, or how his home is furnished, he wakes up late, smokes a joint for breakfast, he’s an outsider, but seems to be ambivalent about it…

Now, I've got a real soft spot for expat stories, but I, for one, couldn’t wait to read on. Come back Monday and we’ll share the first humorous vignette that rewards the reader who reads on in Mr. Lerner's first novel.

First Line Friday: Character

Back to our first line series. We’ve examined opening lines that establish setting, lines that present an axiom, lines that kick things off with dialogue, and lines where narrators break the fourth wall. Today we look at some first lines that introduce a character- like this one from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea :

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”

So we’ve got a character, his habits and occupation, as well as the dilemma he faces, all in one line. Classic. Not surprisingly, some of these character openings focus on physical attributes:

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” —from George Eliot’s Middlemarch  

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.”  —from Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Others go straight for behavioral or, pardon the pun, character attributes:

“Elmer Gantry was drunk.” —from Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” —from C. S. Lewis’s  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

And then, there are some that try to cram everything in at once:

“In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.” —from John Barth’s  The Sot-Weed Factor

I like this kind of opener, if deftly done, but I tend to get annoyed when an author pretends he is a video camera, capturing every last detail for the reader. Hemingway would get a thumbs up, and Barth, a thumbs down. What do you think?

First Line Friday: Breaking the Fourth Wall

Whaddya say, shall we break the fourth wall today?

Do what with the which now, you ask? Break the fourth wall- that imaginary barrier between the actors on a stage and the audience in the theater (or for our purposes, between characters in a story and the reader turning pages.) Oftentimes, narrators and characters don’t even acknowledge the reader’s existence. Other times they step right up and introduce themselves. “Call me Ishmael,” says Hermann Melville in Moby Dick.  “In a sense, I am Jacob Horner,” says John Barth in his lead off to The End of the Road. 

In both cases you’ve got a first-person narrator, so it’s somewhat natural to address the reader directly, or make personal asides. Still, it’s an interesting choice to shake hands with the reader rather than launch into the story or kick off some tension-building plot point. I happen to like it.

And look at the amount of character info you can convey in just one sentence packed with dialect and mannerisms and tone:

“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

“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

But you don’t necessarily need a first-person protagonist to make this work. Before he tells us “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” Kurt Vonnegut presents the reader with all sorts of personal vignettes, dirty limericks and the like in  his novel Slaughterhouse-Five.  How does that one begin?

“All this happened, more or less.”

And Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler  speaks directly to the reader because, well, it’s the reader that is the protagonist of that book. He makes that pretty clear in his famous, fourth-wall-breaking first line:

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

There are plenty of other examples, too. This kind of opener can set tone, introduce a character or frame the main story:

“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” —from Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

“For a long time, I went to bed early.” —from Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” —from Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

As it turns out, I don’t mind in the least if an author breaks the fourth wall. If anything it personalizes what I’m about to read, puts me on an equal footing with the author and treats me like I’m worth their story-telling time. Anybody else a fan? Anybody hate it?

First Line Friday: A Peek Into the Future

Back to our First Line Fridays series. We’ve covered setting, axioms and dialogue, now let’s take a peek into the future.

Sometimes the best way to kick off a novel is to come right out and hang the ending before the reader like a carrot before a horse. This doesn’t necessarily mean the story is spoiled, mind you, but when the reader is given  some sense of destination the immediate reaction tends to be “Whoa! Okay,  so that’s where we’re going? I’m game.” Here’s a perfect example, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

“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.” —from One Hundred Years of Solitude.

We covered another such first line not too long ago, by Jeffrey Eugenides:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” — from Middlesex.

Here’s what I wrote about that line at the time, it applies just as well to the first example:

"I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story."

Here’s another one, from Robert Graves’  I, Claudius :

"I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled."

But sometimes all you have to do is hint at the ending. Others have handled the peek-into-the-future opening much more subtly. Take the first line of Dickens’s David Copperfield :

“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.”

Or Paul Auster’s City of Glass:

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

In that example, we don’t even have the slightest idea what  “it” is that the wrong number started, but there’s a hint of the story and its ending in there that makes you want to learn more. Count me as a fan of the peek-into-the-future first line. 

First Line Friday: Dialogue

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

Wait, what? Who is  Mrs. Dalloway? Who’s she talking  to? And what is it she buying flowers for ? All great questions, and all great reasons for the reader to read further. By starting Mrs. Dalloway  in the middle of things, Virginia Woolf forces the reader to snap to attention. We feel like we’re one step behind and we’d better pull ourselves together if we’re going to make heads or tails of the story. 

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but when we're forced to cut to the chase we become highly attuned to the character descriptions, background details and other exposition that she’ll dole out as the story unfolds- probably even moreso than if we picked up the same story to read “Mrs. Dalloway was self-conscious about her role in London high society, blah, blah, blah…”

Here are some other examples of novels whose characters come out of the gates blabbering:

“—Money . . . in a voice that rustled.”   (William Gaddis, J R )

You better not never tell nobody but God.  (Alice Walker, The Color Purple )

"To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die."  (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses )

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.  (Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond )

"When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing."  (Katherine Dunn, Geek Love )

I’m actually surprised this isn’t used more than it is. My guess is that people think it’s a gimmick, but I think it’s pretty darned effective. You?

First Line Friday: Axioms

Last week we covered first lines that set settings. This week, we pay tribute to the axiomatic opening. Here’s a well-known example that many will recognize:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Want another? How about this one- equally as famous as the first:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina

These adages can be sarcastic, like Austen’s, or introduce a kind of a farcical situation, like Tolstoy’s. Or they can be whistful observations::

“Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” (Zora Neals Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God )

And even wisecracking laments:

“The moment one learns English, complications set in.” (Felipe Alfau’s  Chromos)

You could almost say that The Great Gatsby   begins with an aphorism, too: “…my father gave me some advice…” (Though the adage is only teed up in the first line, and it’s the second line that delivers the punch of wisdom.) Still, it gives the reader a filter through which they are to understand the entire book.

Anyway, I think axiomatic openings are pretty effective. They push you to start asking questions immediately. Do I agree with that axiom? Is it bunk? Why does the narrator lead off with it? What kind of story is going to prove that statement out? And on and on.

Do you agree? Disagree? (As the old adage says, you cannot do both.)

First Line Friday: Setting

For the next few First Line Fridays, I thought we’d try something a little different. Rather than giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to a particular opening line, it might be interesting to analyze the various types  of first lines that are possible.

One of the most basic things a first line can do is establish setting, so let’s kick this off with a few openings that quite literally “set the stage” for their stories. I find that a lot of authors carry this dramatist’s compulsion, so the examples are pretty plentiful.

Though I’ve never met anyone who’s read it, Edward George Bullward-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford  gives us one of the most commonly quoted (and parodied) opening phrases ever:

“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.”

A little hackneyed? Yes. But the “setting setter” isn’t limited to 3^rd rate scribblers. We’ve covered similar lines from Orwell and Hemingway, as well:

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.” — from Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms

Very simple, but very effective. I love how Orwell absolutely pantses his reader with the clock “striking thirteen,” and I love how Hemingway’s phrase “of that year” makes us feel like we’re in the middle of a fireside chat and he’s about to launch into a story we’ve already asked for.

Here are some others:

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.” —from Sylvia Plath’s, The Bell Jar

“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.” — from Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” —from William Gibson’s Neuromancer

So? What say you? Do you like the “setting setter?” Or is it too hokey, too obviously reminding you that you’re being told a story?

First Line Friday! 2012 election edition Vol. II

Last week we looked at the first lines of Mitt Romney’s books. Today we examine the first lines of President Obama’s. First, from  Dreams From My Father:

A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.

And then this one, from The Audacity of Hope:

On most days I enter the Capitol through the basement. A small subway train carries me from the Hart Building, where my office is located, through and underground tunnel lined with the flags and seals of the fifty states.

Okay, so what do we think about these bad boys? I think it’s apparent that the president writes with a little more flare than Governor Romney- then again, we would probably expect that from the man whose mug adorns the iconic HOPE poster. But while the first example above carries a pretty great hook (what was the news?!), the second one is a relatively pedestrian opening to a book we already know is going to be political. I would definitely read on after the first  first line above- and I’d be pretty ambivalent about reading on after the second one. (Unless I were the owner of an iconic HOPE poster, that is.)

First Line Friday! 2012 election edition

When I’m not bloviating about books and literature, I’m a pretty hopeless political junky. And with the two major party conventions taking place this week and next, I figured I’d combine those two hobbies for First Line Friday. Today we examine the opening of Mitt Romney’s two books, Turnaround  and No Apology.  Next week we’ll examine the two books penned by President Obama.

In Turnaround,  Romney’s hidden his first line behind a “preface to the paperback edition,” an “introduction and acknowledgements” section, and a prologue. But chapter one kicks off like this:

“In the fall of 1998 I got a call asking whether I would consider taking the helm of the troubled Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Olympic Games. I dismissed the notion out of hand.”

In No Apology,  he begins like this:

“I hate to weed. I’ve hated it ever since my father put me to work weeding the garden at our home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.”

Well, William Faulkner they are not. But since people picking up the books will already be familiar with their premises, those two openings do set an effective hook by making the reader wonder “how are we going to get there from here?” If he didn’t want to take on the Olympics, why did he end up doing it? And what the heck does weeding a garden have to do with American exceptionalism? I haven’t read either book, so I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I would read on.

You?

     

First Line Friday! Police Line-up

We’ve covered some amazing first lines and some others that tend to… fall flat. This raises some questions: Is a first line truly any different than any other line? Does a first line have  to knock you on your butt? Are the first lines of “great” books actually better than those of lesser books?

Let’s put that last question to the test. Our first lines today come to you courtesy of my phone’s camera, and the $0.50 romance bin at my local used bookstore. But here’s the catch. There are also two so-called “classics” mixed in for good measure. Without the crutch of your favorite search engine, can you pick the two classics out of the line-up? Just curious…

First Line Friday! William Least Heat Moon

Today’s first lines comes to you courtesy of my bedside table, where sits William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways  at the moment. Take a look:

“Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollment at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I’d been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her “friend” Rick or Dick Chick. Something like that.”

The opening sentence, and the one that follows it, don’t so much launch into a story, as they simply share some words to the wise. And any time we recognize the voice of experience talking to us, we do a very human thing, we start calculating whether or not we should trust the source and heed the warning, or whether we should dismiss it out of hand. We become eager to hear the tale behind the advice. Curiosity overtakes us, and we read on.

Here’s a guy on the edge. His marriage is on the rocks, he’s anxious about his job, and then boom- things go from bad to worse. He gets canned, his wife has replaced him and he’s pushed right over the precipice. Now he’s susceptible to all sorts of crazy whims. And we want to know just how crazy it gets. All in all, I think it’s a great opening. Worked for me, anyway.

Another Month in the Can

We’ve seen our traffic take a slight dip in the past month. We can only hope it’s evidence that people are enjoying their summer instead of burning their eyes out surfing the information superhighway. To the rest of you, why don’t you go out and have some fun while the weather holds? Don’t worry, we’ll be here when you get back.

As usual, here are our five most popular posts from this past month:

An Inside Look at Shelf Actualization HQ

At the Bindary

What is Oulipo?

Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 5

Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 7

And the many-splendored search terms that led readers here:

Phillis Diller really big hair  >>>>  We've mentioned her once

John updike on the sidewalk  >>>>  I disagree with Updike here

Topless hemingway  >>>>  ...And Twain, Ginsberg and London

How does midnight in paris portray paris  >>>>  See here

To have and have not book  >>>>  The only Hemingway/Faulkner collaboration

Little Lizzy Mann  >>>>  Covered it here

Knut Jensen cyclist  >>>>  Our only cycling post so far

Guy frozen on dance floor  >>>>  This awesome post

The bee gees Saturday night fever album cover  >>>>  The same post again

From the first clang of the rail  >>>>  First Line Friday, Solzhenitsyn style

First Line Friday!

Today’s first line is one that absolutely grabs you by the ears and demands you pay attention. Have a look:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

Excuse me? You were what?  So begins Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middlesex.  

I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story.

Here’s how the next couple lines continue fleshing out the novel’s destination. I think it’s brilliant.

"Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology  in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity.  That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."

Agree? Disagree? Fire away!

First Line Friday

If you’ve had a sneaking suspicion that this blog has been on auto-pilot for the past two and a half weeks, you’re very astute. (Was it the eight straight days of Bookish Nerd Bait that tipped you off? The lack of responsiveness to comments? The dearth of weekend posts? All of the above?) Well, we’re back. And we’re better than ever.*

My vacation spanned three weekends, two countries, and despite my best efforts, only one book. So without further ado, let’s resume First Line Friday by looking at the opening of that particular book:

“The circus arrives without warning. 

“No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”

It’s the opening salvo in Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus,  and if you’ve read the title of this book before you get to the first page (hey, I’m not making any assumptions about your crazy reading habits) you already have some vague idea of what it’s going to be about. You know what a circus is, of course, but you may be asking yourself what the devil a night  circus might be.

The first line gets right down to business. There’s no beating around the bush, no backstory or exposition, no long lead-in. Just answers. It’s slightly mysterious, yet it already unveils some of the mystery the reader brings to the reading. It begins to explain and yet it raises new questions. It’s a great hook, and that’s what first lines are all about.

The book is by no means a great work headed for the Western Canon, but it’s a pretty decent opening if you ask me. Check it out.

* We’re not actually better than ever, but we probably feel a bit better post-vacation

Another Month in the Can

Thanks for hanging out with us! Above are the authors we mentioned this past month, and here are the most popular posts from the same period:

• Hemingway and Gellhorn
• The Tour de France
• Review: Silas Marner, by George Eliot
• First Line Friday: Cry, the Beloved Country
• Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 1

And of course, the wacky search terms that led some of you here:

• “On the Road mental illness”  >>>>  Diagnosing Dean Moriarty
• “Pronouns with no antecedent Faulkner”  >>>>  Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity
• “Egan system tension grip”  >>>>  takes you to Jennifer Egan
• “Barcelona gracia neighborhood”  >>>>  Tucker’s birth as a reader
• “Moby Dick seventh grade essay”  >>>> MacEvoy’s birth as a reader
• “Trivium down from the sky  >>>>  the only place we’ve used ‘trivium’
• “No pants required”  >>>>  Takes you to this post of the same title
• “lanza en astillero English translation”  >>>>  takes you here
• “Hate on the road Kerouac”  >>>>  shows you whyyou shouldn’t
• “two figures in a greek frieze”  >>>>  takes you to Mr.Faulkner