Friday Firsts

Head over to Wendy’s blog to participate in Friday Firsts.

Do you find this line [of Mrs Dalloway] interesting if so why? Do you have any first lines that you find fascinating for no particular reason?

You’d think I’d be better at working to a deadline by now wouldn’t you? Nope, I’m hopeless.

I wasn’t terribly enamored with the line of Mrs Dalloway (“Mrs. Dalloway said she’d buy all the flowers herself.”), however that may change if I were reading the book myself. Either way I don’t think it really matters; I think we’re all drawn to something different and all that matters is that we find something we like.

For instance, after thinking and thinking and thinking I finally came up with two first lines that I really like (or at least, I could remember them, which considering my memory for first lines had to be saying something).

#1 Markus Zusak’s The Book Theif

First the colors.

Not terribly fascinating on it’s own, I know, but I love the sharpness of it. It’s direct and to the point without actually telling you what that point is. And then it just builds up and delivers the voice of one of my favourite narrators.

First the colors.
Then the humans.
That's usually how I see things.
Or at least, how I try.
***HERE IS A SMALL FACT ***
You are going to die.

If you haven’t read this book yet, you should.

#2 Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic

In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part...

See...

Great A'Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.

Okay, so that wasn’t exactly just the first sentence, but eh, I’m breaking the rules today. What more could you want from an opening sentence/paragraph(s)? You just know the book is going to be crazy and wonderful all wrapped up in one.