First Lines - There's Probably an App for This

So does a great novel need a killer opening line? Are some great openings wasted on terrible novels? I collected the four opening sentences below at random over the past few months, just to see how they stack up - to each other, to the books they begin, and on their own. Of the four, the one that struck me the most forcefully was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the title short story in a collection by the 20th-century English writer Alan Sillitoe. In one smooth, uncluttered sentence, Sillitoe sets the scene and at the same instant gets the story off and running - a model of grace and economy. Hemingway nearly does the same thing, but he's really jamming stuff into the sentence. Orwell's can't help but grab the reader. I considered including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but its first sentence is a fragment. No dice. Good book, though.

• "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." The Old Man and the Sea


• 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 1984


• “As soon as I got to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner.” The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner


• “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.” Don Quixote

So send me your favorite first lines - best and worst. But no Dickens ("It was the best of times...") or Edward Bulwer-Lytton ("It was a dark and stormy night.")

This Week's Trivia

I've been collecting interesting trivia (is that an oxymoron?). Once I reach ten items, I'll post them. Here's the first installment. Read on and learn...if you dare.

1. Ho Chi Minh, the father of modern Viet Nam, left what was then French Indochina on a steamship in 1911, at the age of 21. He did not set foot in his native country for another 30 years.


2. Most people recognize the name of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—the Enola Gay—but not that of the B-52 that dropped the bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki a few days later: Bocks Car.


3. Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town is staged, on average, somewhere in the world every night.


4. The longest English word that you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand is “stewardesses.”


5. Massachusetts voters have not elected a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years.


6. Some of the names that the Beatles considered (and rejected) for their seventh studio album were: Beatles on Safari, Pendulum, Four Sides of the Eternal Triangle, Magical Circles, Abracadabra, and After Geography. The band eventually agreed on Revolver.


7. In Elizabethan England, about a quarter of the male population was named John. The pool of common first names numbered fewer than 40 for each gender. 70% of men were named John, Thomas, William, Richard, or Robert.


8. In German, the equivalent of the phrase “It’s all Greek to me” (meaning “I don’t understand the subject”) is “It’s all Bohemian villages to me.”


9. No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of British Prime Ministers since the 1700s, contains about 100 rooms.


10. Rock n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry now holds the copyright to the Beach Boys’ first #1 single, “Surfin’ USA,” because the band stole the entire song from the Berry composition “Sweet Little Sixteen.”