Books with amazing first lines really stick with me. And it's so often that an amazing first line is the entry into an extraordinary book.
So it is with this year's Orange Prize winner, The Tiger's Wife, by Téa Obreht. It reads,
"In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers."
I was pulled in immediately and wish the other parts of my life would go away so I can focus on reading this wonderful book without interruption.
Nancy Pearl also loves first lines and gives some more great famous first words reading ideas on NPR, including these:
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
"Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last." Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
Summer is a perfect time to sink into books old and new. Sno-Isle Libraries offers some great summer reading lists, and we're always here in person and on-line to provide reading suggestions made just for you!
Kara
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Chiseled in an arch over a door in the Yale Grad School is the following first line:
"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad." from Scaramouche: A Romance of the French Revolution.
My grandfather just gave me an old book titled "Treasury of the World's Best Loved Poems." His favorite, "Mandalay," is at the end of the book. But he opened to the first page and on it was the poem, "The Passionate Shepard To His Love." He read the opening lines to me: "Come live with me and be my love" and looked up and asked what more would one need than that? Ah... opening lines: they are kind of like a first kiss.
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