The Best First lines Of A Novel.

I'll have to think about first lines but I've just been reading the 'Great Gatsby' which has a fantastic first page which includes this beaut, "Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth." jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

Don't remember 'em! Generally speaking, though, I do recall that Robert Rankin has some pretty fine beginnings... ~PEPS~ “There is no spoon.”

I can't remember many off the top of my head ('Call me Ishamael' is about it). One that is not a first line (it occurs three pages in, ending the opening preamble), but is so good it ought to still count, is from Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar: 'I begin to discern the profile of my own death.'

First lines? Bloody hell I have problems remembering the names of the characters when I've finished a book.

Once upon a time....

Gabriel Garcia Marquez does good first lines. From Love in the time of cholera: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." So does Pynchon. From Gravity's Rainbow: "A screaming comes across the sky." Joe

so far among my favourites are '124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.' Toni Morrison's Beloved

"Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals." Valis by Philip K Dick. "On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen." Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." LP Hartley, The Go-Between "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York." Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar "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 stops down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita "If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings." Jon McGregor, if nobody speaks of remarkable things And there are more but I've not got enough time to track down the books in my shelves. I think my favourite of these is Nabokov's - so much of Humbert and the story held in those few words.

Mykle squealed in delight as Yan released the catapult sending the cucumber up his own arse. The yet to be completed Bible Part Two, 'an obsevation on the habits of men'. The first book was a best seller, the seconds got to do okay.

That one from the Bell Jar is my favourite, I think. I haven't got the exact quotations to hand, but there are two nicely similar ones thus :- "It was a cold October day and the clocks were striking thirteen" - 1984 "There's something very unsettling about realising that a day you know is Thursday making sounds exactly like a Sunday" Day of the Triffids And I'd have to add the opening to "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller" by Italo Calvino, which has the freakiest opening passage of any novel I've read (apart from all the Harry Stephen Keener stuff that I've been addicted to for the last year, but that's an entirely different matter)

Yes, I'm back. In London at the moment. Hoping to do some locum work, which will let me earn about the same money but have three months a year off to travel and write. How are things with you?

E&E - have you never heard of email, or do you think we're interested in your chat? ..... Well we might be if you told us intimate stuff, maybe. You should set up an Emily & Emma web page, come to think of it.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit light-headed; maybe you should drive...'" Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S Thompson or "It began as a mistake." Post Office - Bukowski or "Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip." Manhattan Transfer - John Dos Passos or "Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick." The Shining - Stephen King They're the ones I always remember for some reason.