"First Sentences are doors to worlds."
- Ursula Le Guin
Does the opening line of a book make it or break it for you? Sometimes even staff members are drawn in by the very first line. Here are a few staff favorites!
This staff blog is full of one liners that will draw you right in! Library staff members were asked for their favorite FIRST LINES... but be warned, library staff often struggle with following instructions! HA! Even directors occasionally bend the rules...
"Even before he got electrocuted,
Jason was having a rotten day."
Adara's first line pick comes from the book The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan. Here's a quick summery of the first book in the Heroes of Olympus series:
"Jason has a problem. He doesn't remember anything before waking up on a school bus, holding hands with a girl. Apparently she's his girlfriend Piper, his best friend is a kid named Leo, and they're all students in the Wilderness School, a boarding school for "bad kids." What he did to end up here, Jason has no idea - except that everything seems very wrong."
Rick Riordan's book The Lost Hero is available in regular and large print; audiobook on CD, hoopla, Libby, and cloudLibrary; E-book on hoopla, Libby, Kindle; and on Playaway.
"The circus arrives without warning."
This first line for Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus pulled Rachel in with it's sense of mystery and dread. While the book summery leans heavy on the romance, this book was so much more! A wonderful mix of an interesting magic system, romance, and a reveal Rachel would love to read for the first time again and again. Here is your book summery...
"Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways."
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is available in regular and large print; audiobook on CD, Libby, and cloudLibrary, and E-book on Libby, cloudLibray, and Kindle.
"The Man in Black fled across the desert
and the Gunslinger followed."
Rachel and Kyle could fight over the right to use this one! But Kyle wins... I mean he has this line tattooed on his leg! As Kyle says, the first line for Stephen King's The Gunslinger is simply the perfect opener that gives you everything. It sets up our two leads, The Man in Black and the Gunslinger. It gives us the setting, a desert unnamed. It gives us the plot action we are watching, The Gunslinger following the Man in Black. Stephen King tells you exactly what is happening in his story without revealing too much. Kyle was hooked from the first statement into his magnum opus. Here is the summery for the first book in King's The Dark Tower series:
"This heroic fantasy is set in a world of ominous landscape and macabre menace that is a dark mirror of our own. A spellbinding tale of good versus evil, it features one of Stephen King's most powerful creations--The Gunslinger, a haunting figure who embodies the qualities of the lone hero through the ages from ancient myth to frontier western legend. His pursuit of The Man in Black, his liaison with the sexually ravenous Alice, his friendship with the kid from Earth called Jake, are part of a drama that is both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, an alchemy of storytelling sorcery."
The Gunslinger by Stephen King is available in regular print; Audiobook on CD, Libby, and cloudLibrary; and E-book on Libby.
"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over
my husband's dead body is not entirely accurate.
Edward, it should be noted,
was still twitching upon the floor."
Ok, ok, so Bobbi's pick is technically two lines... but they are pretty epic! What a wonderful way for Deanna Raybourn to hook readers into her book Silent in the Grave. Did this first line (ok, lines) grab your attention? Here is a quick summery of the first book in the Lady Julia Grey series:
"These ominous words, slashed from the pages of a book of Psalms, are the last threat that the darling of London society, Sir Edward Grey, receives from his killer. Before he can show them to Nicholas Brisbane, the private inquiry agent he has retained for his protection, Sir Edward collapses and dies at his London home, in the presence of his wife, Julia, and a roomful of dinner guests. Prepared to accept that Edward's death was due to a long-standing physical infirmity, Julia is outraged when Brisbane visits and suggests that Sir Edward has been murdered. It is a reaction she comes to regret when she discovers the damning paper for herself, and realizes the truth."
Silent in the Grave by Deanna Raybourn is available in regular print and E-Book on Libby, hoopla, and Kindle.
"Books ran when they grew restless,
when they grew unruly, or when they grew real. Regardless of the reason, when books ran,
it was a librarian's duty to catch them."
Ok, so Aric cannot follow the rules either! But once again, these two lines just pull us right in! The book summery for The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith follows:
"Books that are not finished by their authors reside in the Library of the Unwritten in Hell. Part of Claire's, the head librarian, job is to keep the restless stories from materializing as characters and escaping. When a hero escapes, Blaire must track him down with the help of assistant Brevity and the demon Leto. The simple retrieval goes horribly wrong, when they are attacked by the angel Ramiel, who is convinced they have the Devil's Bible, a weapon in the power struggle between Heaven and Hell."
The first in the Hell's Library series, The Library of the Unwritten by A.J. Hackwith is available in regular print and audiobook on Libby.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;
even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."
Shirley Jackson uses the first line of this ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House, to tell us to look inside ourselves. This book is a ghost story, but it's also a story about the human mind and heart, and what the conditions of the supernatural can do to us. Kyle feels that this is a great first line that has you hooked immediately. Check out the book summery:
"The story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly place called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a chilling encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers--and soon it will choose one of them to make its own."
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson is available in regular print; audiobook on CD and cloudLibrary; and E-book on Libby, cloudLibrary and Kindle.
"If I have learned anything in the long life of mine,
it is this: In love we find out who we want to be;
in war we find out who we are."
This first line just completely sets up the journey you are about to take when you enter The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah. Rachel felt this line was the perfect representation of the battle in all of us and our capacity for both cruelty and compassion. Here is a brief summery:
"France, 1939. In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets and falls in love with Gaetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance, risking her life time and again to save others."
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is available in regular and large print; audiobook on CD, hoopla, Libby, and cloudLibrary; E-book on Libby, cloudLibrary, and Kindle; and on Playaway.
"We must, by law, keep a record of the innocents we kill.
And as I see it, they're all innocents. Even the guilty. Everyone is guilty of something, and everyone still harbors a memory of childhood innocence, no matter how many layers of life wrap around it. Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true."
For our final favorite first line, Aric breaks all the rules selecting the first line and PARAGRAPH of Neal Shusterman's Scythe. Such a rule breaker! Take a look at the summery for Scythe, the first in the Arc of a Scythe series:
"In a world where disease has been eliminated, the only way to die is to be randomly killed (gleaned) by professional reapers (scythes). Citra and Rowan are teenagers who have been selected to be scythe's apprentices, and despite wanting nothing to do with the vocation they must learn the art of killing and come to understand the necessity of what they do. Only one of them will be chosen as a scythe's apprentice. And when it becomes clear that the winning apprentice's first task will be to glean the loser, Citra and Rowan are pitted against one another in a fight for their lives."
Scythe by Neal Shusterman is available in regular and large print; audiobook on CD; and E-book on Libby and Kindle.
Until Next Time Library Friends!
The Vespasian Warner Library is located at 310 N. Quincy St in Clinton, IL 61727
Contact us by phone, 217-935-5174, by email library@vwarner.org, or drop in and say hello!
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