What's your favorite book opening?

I was thinking about this in the book thread, and thought I'd throw it open. What's your favorite opening sentence, or paragraph - but no more - from a novel you love, and would recommend? Tell us, and tell us what's so great about the book, in general, or just for you.

My favorite is the opening of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer':

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

What's interesting about this is that unless you are old enough to remember broadcast TV, this will bring up an image of perhaps a solid blue screen. But it's meant to evoke a screen crawling with static pixels, backgrounded by a hash of static noise washing out of the speakers. It's a kind of deadening grey that is constantly changing and always the same, that beats down your senses and presses against you with the desire for action, for making things *change* just to get away from it.

Which sets the scene entirely for the book.

So what's yours?

I came into the thread to post that same opening. Re-read it a couple of months ago, it's still so good.

To add something else:

"Beverly Hills, 11/22/58

He always shot up by TV light.
Some spics waved guns. The head spic plucked bugs from his beard and fomented. Black & white footage; CBS geeks in jungle fatigues. A newsman said, Cuba, bad juju - Fidel Castro's rebels vs. Fulgencio Batista's standing army.
Howard Hughes found a vein and mainlined codeine. Pete watched on the sly - Hughes left his bedroom door ajar."

James Ellroy is my favorite author and American Tabloid is his best book. It's the relentless prose, really, conjuring evocative and disturbing images with no regard for the rules of written language. I don't read poetry, but Ellroy and Gibson are the closest I get.

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere opens with "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

Which is a decent introduction, come to think of it, to the way Gaiman does things.

Both very good books indeed.

I finally read Old Man's War for the first time. Heard many good things, but never got around to it. I knew I'd like it from the first paragraph:

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.

The concept, attitude and clipped sentences got me right away

Roger Zelazny wrote:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god, but then he never claimed not to be a god.

H. P. Lovecraft wrote:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

misplacedbravado wrote:

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere opens with "The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

Which is a decent introduction, come to think of it, to the way Gaiman does things.

He's referencing the opening to William Gibson's Neuromancer there. But in the 80s, the sky was grey like a dead channel

The first chapter of Diamond Crash is still one of the best I've read.

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

My parents bought 1984 for me as a Christmas present when I was 12. That line just crashed into me; the sense that this was something very different to anything that I had read before was immediate.

Lord of Light was the first thing I thought of, but tanstaafl beat me to it. Zelazny was a glorious writer. It's a tragedy we lost him so young.

Two of my favorites:

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon.

"All this happened, more or less." Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut.

EDIT: Oh, and one more, just because it sets the book up so well and it's one of my all-time favorites:

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving.

"The angel lay in a little thicket. It had no need of love; there was nothing anywhere in the world could startle it - we can lie here with the angel if we like; it couldn't have hurt much when they slit its throat."

The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen

“The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed.” The Gunslinger, Stephen King.

Call me Ishmael.

Yeah, it's old school, but it leads to 635 pages of Epic.

I've always loved Hogfather's opening. "Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree."

It's too long to qualify but special mention goes to the first chapter of Pandora's Star, if you haven't read go use amazons "Look Inside" feature.

Blood Rites by Jim Butcher

Chapter 1

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

My boots slipped and slid on the tile floor as I sprinted around a corner and toward the exit doors to the abandoned school building on the southwest edge of Chicagoland. Distant streetlights provided the only light in the dusty hall, and left swaths of blackness crouching in the odd classroom doors. I carried an elaborately carved wooden box about the size of a laundry basket in my arms, and its weight made my shoulders burn with effort. I'd been shot in both of them at one time or another, and the muscle burn quickly started changing into deep, aching stabs. The damned box was heavy, not even considering its contents. Inside the box, a bunch of flop-eared grey-and-black puppies whimpered and whined, jostling back and forth as I ran.

I'm afraid I can't quote it but the first page of Enders Game. Was to this day my first and only "must read this book till it's done right now in one sitting" moment.

Zona wrote:

I've always loved Hogfather's opening. "Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree."

Pratchett is great at openings - I always liked "Against the wash of stars a nebula hangs, one red giant gleaming like the madness of gods." from Moving Pictures.

mateo wrote:

Call me Ishmael.

Yeah, it's old school, but it leads to 635 pages of zzzZZZZzzzzzz.

FTFM

I couldn't get anywhere in Moby Dick, but that is indeed a kickass opening.

There's nothing that I can think of that's really stuck with me personally. I barely read at all anymore and back when I was a big reader I was just inhaling several books a week so stuff tends to slip away.

*edit*

As I hit post I remembered that Empire of the Sun has an awesome opening, so I looked it up.

'Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.'

It's so typical of Ballard. Evocative and a touch baroque with ideas that run into and over each other.

My favourite two for punch:

"It was the day my grandmother exploded" - Crow Road, Iain Banks
"The have our daughter" - Changes, Jim Butcher

Going further back, two openings that are tonally very fitting:

"He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead" - The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
and of course:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has—or rather had—a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

Ah, Dudley, I forgot about Pride and Prejudice. To this day, I'm not sure if she's being literal, or snarky, or both. I suspect the latter, a disdain for social constraints, but it's a marvelous sentence (and a fantastic story).

It is a little further in than the opening, per se, but it is close enough to be an opener in my thinking. I have always liked Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon:

“Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate....

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

LilCodger wrote:

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

See above. You've been Tannhauserred.

I continued on because I love the line "nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change."

So what fascinates people about these? Is it the story that follows? The literary ability of the author? The beauty of the words? Don't just put up something nice and walk away. Tell us *why* you like it, and why we should too.

And surely there's more out there than the ultra-famous, most of which we already know... It's a challenge!

Not a book, but my favorite short story of all time (Celephais, H.P. Lovecraft):

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name.

A couple paragraphs later, one of my favorite literary quotes of all time:

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Zona wrote:

It's too long to qualify but special mention goes to the first chapter of Pandora's Star, if you haven't read go use amazons "Look Inside" feature.

Seconded. I enjoyed a lot Peter Hamilton's Pandora's Star (and the sequel), and Reality Dysfunction series.

This topic reminded me of a really interesting article that I read a few months ago that's basically Stephen King discussing opening lines of books.

Edit: here's what I'll add...

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes wrote:

I remember, in no particular order:
-a shiny inner wrist;
-steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
-gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
-a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
-another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
-bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.

The last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

That last line there stuck with me throughout the entire book and colored everything that I read as I read it.

"See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves."

The opening lines of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

That first sentence just dares you to start reading aloud, and if you do, your patience will be rewarded. The whole novel is a grisly prose poem.

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

First para of Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake.

I am a fast reader, and prone to skimming. Both times I read this series I devoured every single word. Just quoting this opening makes me want to read it again.