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Best opening Scene/Sentence/Word?

S

Sentinel

New Member
I remember (at a fairly young age) getting hold of "When Eight Bells Toll" by Alistair MacLean. And of being absolutely mesmerized by the opening of the book.

The first few sentences where the protagonist
describes in detail, what a gunshot-wound to your leg inflicted by the infamous Colt Peacemaker would do to your health
just made my day.

Can you give more examples where the first couple of sentences (not more) of a novel are so abloutely fascinating? You might want to use spoiler tags not to tick anyone off in case there are real surprises there...

Jan
 
I'm not sure you can ruin the novel if you are describing the opening scenes from it. Surely that's the part everyone reads first and so nothing is a spoiler...right? :D

Anyhoo, The Prayer for Owen Meany, where the narrator tells of his belief in God due to the boy with the 'wrecked voice' who was the instrument in his mothers death was, to me, very captivating.

Mxx
 
the opening scene in gravity's rainbow is a nice one:

'a screaming comes across the sky. it has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.'

it makes the novel kind of circular. in the end a rocket is speeding towards a theater, faster than the speed of sound, but whether or not it explodes and kills everyone isn't made clear. the screaming in the beginning means there were people around to hear it, so it must've spared them.

a nice, happy ending.
 
The opening lines from Chuck Palahniuk's Choke are quite good. He asks you if you are planning to read the book, and then he tells you not to bother, it's just not worth the effort.

Got me hooked!

Cheers, Martin :D
 
Maybe since I used to live in Monterey, I've always loved these first lines of Steinbeck's prologue to Cannery Row:



**Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.


:)
 
The house of leaves

I am not reading it yet but I peeked inside the frount cover :)

"This is not for you."

And on the next page: "I still get nightmares. In fact I get them so often that I should be used to them by now. I'm not."

Good stuff?

Regards
SillyWabbit
 
Even though it may not be 'best' per se, but one of my personal favorite opening scenes/sentences/words would be the opening from "Every Living Thing"

"I am never at my best in the early morning, especially a cold morning in the Yorkshire spring with a piercing March wind sweeping down from the fells, finding its way inside my clothing, nipping at my nose and ears. It was a cheerless time, and a particularly bad time to be standing in this cobbled farmyard watching a beautiful horse dying because of my incompetence."

I don't know why, maybe just because I've read/heard it so many times it seems like the best opening in the world to me..or maybe I just havn't read enough books yet, though my dad and friends would say otherwise.
 
best opening

i agree with two of the suggestions here - the opening to choke is good and so is the opening to Dorain Gray, however i think my all time favourite has to be iain banks - crow road "it was the day my grandmother exploded...."

ksky
 
Gotta love Iain Banks! Great opening, that!

Is Crow Road worth checking out? I've only read The Wasp Factory and Dead Air, both of which I loved.

Cheers, Martin :D
 
iain banks

definately - read the crow road, i thought it was great, one of his best. I think i know your local waterstones! the one on the corner?

started an iain banks thread in author discussion not much meat i'm afraid!

ksky
 
Great, I'll look out for it!

And you know the Waterstones in Amsterdam? Cool! It is the one on the corner, yes!

Cheers, Martin :D
 
Susan Elderkin's 'Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains' begins:

"When he moved to Arizona and set up home amongst the giant saguaros of the Sonoran Desert, Theobald Moon developed the habit of getting up early in the morning, peeing in a glass, and knocking it back in a few quick gulps while it was still warm and fresh."

Nice.

A refreshing opening if ever I saw one.
 
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again
Du Maurier ~ Rebecca

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,must be in want of a wife
Austin ~ Pride and Prejudice

"This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it." -
Goldman ~ The Princess Bride
 
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