13 Opening Paragraphs/Pages

This week, I've found inspiration in a number of places, not least of which include the opening pages of the novels I've read recently. I shared the source of inspiration which made me want to be a (better) writer in an earlier post this week, and that in turn got me to thinking about what makes a book grab you and want to keep reading.

I wanted to do this post to share the opening paragraphs of the books which are currently strewn about my desk at the present time. Some of them I read last winter, others I read just yesterday. I thought maybe it would be interesting to show how different writers have constructed that all-important first paragraph (or, to be fair, first page or so). For this post, however, I skipped any prologues or forewards in order to get right to the story itself. (And, yes, my own book is on my desk, in both printings.)

So now, please allow me to present to you:

13 Opening Paragraphs/Pages

1) Blackeberg.

It makes you think of coconut-frosted cookies, maybe drugs. "A respectable life." You think subway station, suburb. Probably nothing else comes to mind. People must live there, just like they do in other places. That was why it was built, after all, so that people would have a place to live.




Let the Right One In - John Ajvide Lindqvist:

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2) "Have you seen it?" asked Samantha.

I leaned close to my computer so my editor wouldn't hear me on a personal call.

"Seen what?"

"Oh, nothing. Never mind. We'll talk when you get home."

"Seen what?" I asked again.

"Nothing," Samantha repeated.

"Samantha, you have never once called me in the middle of the day about nothing. Now come on. Spill."

Samantha sighed. "Okay, but remember: Don't shoot the messenger."

Now I was getting worried.



Good in Bed - Jennifer Weiner

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3) Hollyhocks don't grow in the desert. Yet hundreds and hundreds of their red satin blossoms line a wide stone path to a flung iron gate. I know this is a dream. Through the gate lie astonishing, sweeping gardens. There are roses. Ivory and white and the color of burnt cream, they climb trellises and sprawl in beds, spill and ramble and entwine. Boxwood parterres, hedges of yew, clumps of lavender, fat and tall, and white foxgloves nod among dahlias, among white peonies. I know that the castle and the roses and the hollyhocks are sun-stroke illusions. The hallucination will pass. We'll climb back in the car and drive away from this madness of silence and mockery. But while the hallucination endures I want to look over there, where gnarled trunks of wisteria and jasmine and grapevines tent a pergola, make a dark, shady room from whose depths laughter comes. How many days has it been since I've heard laughter? Even my own? I walk toward the pergola, and stand at the opening to see a clutch of women in long black dresses who sit 'round an oilclothed table. Tremulous light insists among the leaves, spangles the women's fingers flurrying over a heap of yellow beans.

"Buongiorno," they say before we can.



That Summer in Sicily - A Love Story - Marlena de Blasi

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4) Jude had a private collection.

He had framed sketches of the Seven Dwarfs on the wall of his studio, in between his platinum records. John Wayne Gacy had drawn them while he was in jail and sent them to him. Gacy liked golden-age Disney almost as much as he liked molesting little kids; almost as much as he liked Jude's albums.



Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill

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5) I can recall the exact moment I got hooked on the sport of bike racing. It was 1968, and I was eight years old. My cousin brought his ten-speed racing bike to my grandmother's house one summer day. It was the most foreign thing I had ever seen, with its crazy handlbars, skinny tires, tiny seat and angry-looking cogs. Everyone in my neighborhood rode Schwinn Sting-Ray bikes, so I stood awestruck in the driveway and looked at that bike like it was from Mars. And though the top of my head barely came up to the tip of the saddle, I knew right then and there that this thing "fit" me.



Roadie - the Misunderstood World of a Bike Racer - Jamie Smith

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6) 'It's your mother.'

Three simple words that chilled me to the core as I accepted the phone from Joyce, the school receptionist. Point one, my mother never, ever  called me at work, and point two, she'd never say she was my mother. She was always Marla -- even as a child I had never been allowed to call her Mum.


Crystal Clear - Nell Dixon

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7) They used to be called the Firefly Lane girls. That was a long time ago--more than three decades--but just now, as she lay in bed listening to a winter storm raging outside, it seemed like yesterday.

Firefly Lane - Kristin Hannah

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8) Dan Swansea came awake in the darkness, not knowing for a minute who he was or where. He lifted one hand to his head and groaned when it came away sticky with blood. Slowly (or at least it felt that way), things returned to him. His name. That he was outside in a parking lot, on his back in the gravel, and he was freezing. Also, except for his shoes and socks, he was naked.

Best Friends Forever - Jennifer Weiner

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9) Restlessly, Emily’s feet slid over the pockmarked concrete of the Rovigo train station platform, chips of disintegrating cement gritting under the soles of her shoes. Two hollow blasts of a distant whistle shook her out of her daze and she sat up on the bench to focus on the pinprick of light emerging from the fog.

Ask Me if I'm Happy - Kimberly Menozzi

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10) In June of 1980, Lydia Arnaud travelled with her parents and two brothers to a critérium - a town centre, short-circuit race - in Longjumeau on the southern end of Paris. Born into a cycling-mad family in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a large suburb on the north-western outskirts of the French capital, fifteen-year-old Lydia was the only daughter of André and Marie-Louise Arnaud, and her weekends were invariably spent supporting her brothers, Thierry and Michel, at various amateur bike races around Paris.


Inside the Peloton - My Life as a Professional Cyclist - Nicolas Roche

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11) My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly brought me back to life. I have kept up with what some people would consider my strange religious practices. After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious study and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour--calm, quiet and introspective--did something to soothe my shattered self.


Life of Pi - Yann Martel

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12) It is early morning.

I have been dozing. I open my eyes.

For a moment, I don't know where I am.

Then I remember the night before, the hands on my shoulders, pushing me, shoving me, the rage and the abuse, my heart racing, my palms sweating.

And then, my guts in sudden freefall, I recognise where I am, the bare walls, the rough blanket, the hanging light bulb.

I am in a French police cell, below Biarritz town hall, in an empty basement. A smell of piss and disinfectant hangs in the air. A drunken man shouts relentlessly in a cell somewhere down the corridor.


Racing Through the Dark - David Millar

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And, finally, the reason I wanted to post this topic in the first place:

13) The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit holes. In places the grass was gone altogether and everywhere there were clusters of dry droppings, through which nothing but the ragwort would grow. A hundred yards away, at the bottom of the slope, ran the brook, no more than three feet wide, half choked with kingcups, watercress and blue brooklime. The cart track crossed by a brick culvert and climbed the opposite slope to a five-barred gate in the thorn hedge. The gate led into the lane.


Watership Down - Richard Adams

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And there you have them. I hope they've intrigued, baffled or otherwise claimed your attention for whatever reason.















And I'm not crazy. I know other things get your attention, too.





















Shiny things. Pretty things.

























Pretty, pretty things.

Yeah, you've seen him before. But do you really mind? And hey - he's readin' a BOOK! Sexay!!!