Favorite First Lines

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, right?

But I sure do judge a book by its first line.

I’ve got to get hooked in that first line.

That’s how you do it? You read the first line?

Yeah.

And one line, that’s all that you give them?

You know, it’s my journalistic background.

I’ve got to be hooked right at the beginning.

How about this one?

It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.

Oh, as Jon Stewart would say, boom!

That’s George Orwell’s 1984, of course.

And speaking of cold, the cold passed reluctantly from the earth,

And the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.

Who’s that?

That is Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage.

I love that.

Army stretched out on the hills, comma, resting.

Well, my favorite, and this is my favorite book of all time,

So I don’t know which came first, liking the book and liking the opening line or liking the opening line and then liking the book.

But my favorite is from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Oh, yeah. Great book.

You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

But that ain’t no matter.

And one of the things I like about it is that Twain, in order to get you to like Huck Finn, has mentioned his bestseller that you probably already read.

Well done. Well done.

But you also get such a sense of the voice, too, right?

Yes.

It’s such a different way of speaking.

He captured the language of a place and a time and an age.

A boy.

A boy’s language.

An attitude.

An attitude, yeah.

Yeah, love that.

What are your favorite opening lines?

What is the thing that you read that made you finish a novel?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Was it a turn of phrase?

Let us know in email to words@waywordradio.org.