A first line in a book is a choice. Do you want to read further? Are the following lines and pages and chapters worth your time? Here are some of our favorite first lines of books, curated by the Ennymedia review team.
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.”
From Beloved by Toni Morrison
“He began to die when he was twenty-one, but tuberculosis is slow and sly and subtle.”
From Doc by Mary Doria Russell
“I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville.”
From No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents, grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.”
From Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
“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 by Jeffrey Eugenides
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
From The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
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