It's so good!

That actually gave me goosebumps! Need to reread that one! :)

Oh, that’s good.

Oooh yes, I loved that one 😍

This is my favourite book of the series, and it doesn’t get enough love.

Yes! Was going to point this out!

i hadn't thought about it this way - but it's sneaky and true. he hooks us in from the very first page and we have to make the choice to play along.

You just convinced me to read Lolita, its been sitting in my room for a couple of months. Thanks!

Great observation! I hadn't thought of that 🤔

Indeed! (Spoiler(ish?): And since Lolita is also the last word of the book, the whole narrative encloses Dolores into this projected Lolita character! With the added horror of a possessive, even.)

facts

Agree. I've only read that book in another language about 20 years ago and I instantly knew what book it was from!

😂

legit why i luv jane austen. bestie said im gonna make the man look for a wife instead of a woman looking for a husband even though she is writing in the 19th century and can't really express her feminist views publicly

I really love the first line from Rebecca “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

I love that!

Imo the best first sentence of any book ever.

I think about this line from time to time. In my opinion, the rest of the book doesn't hold up though. 😭

I just bought that book last week, read only that first sentence and now im so excited to read the rest of it soon

we have a winner!

SHOOT. that's a great one.

AGREED

name a more ICONIC and PERFECT and BRILLIANT opening line, I'll wait

@@caterina820 “Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.”

@@willsolacemahsaamini8681 OH GOD YES, I love that one as well. I think I just love opening lines at this point

This is one of my most favourite books of all time!!

The opening paragraph of Fahrenheit 451 is the best part of the entire book. Incredible

Right??? It established the whole premise of the book in just one VERY well-put sentence 😩✋

Yes, yes, yes!! I was looking for this comment!

I immediately thought of this one too! And especially because I find the translation so interesting to think about. "Aujourd'hui, maman est morte." Maybe it should be "Today, my mother died" or "Today, mother is dead" in English instead? I remember a really good article about this sentence from earlier this year. Perhaps in the New Yorker?

I think the English translation with the comma in-between fits the most, because the original version has one too. I once read that the comma is supposed to separate the past, when his mother was alive, from the present, in which she's dead. In the German version there are versions with and without it (the comma) though, so I bet there are multiple English versions too ^^

@@readingkate The choice of "maman" - closer to "mom" than "mother" - is also very important. It is very significant, in a French book written by a man in the 40s, to choose "mom". It denotes the reality of his feelings towards his mother, the child hurting in him, the innocence still raw at the death of his mom. The book has many, many problems, but this opener is marvelous.

@@marcmoreno1378 ooh yes

yes omg

Me trying to find a stopping point in a Tale of Two Cities- "I'll just finish this sentence and put it down" *reads half an entire chapter in one sentence*

@@emily933 I'm reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Márquez right now and he does not now how to end a sentece. There are so many multi-page sentences, it's so dence

hahahaha

that's a hilarious observation & so, so TRUE!!!

I was thinking the exact same thing!

Yes!!!

lol, TL;DR

@@BR-jt6ny this made me cackle 😂

Yes!!!

Yes! With different genres!

I would love this as a series!!

Yes, please! :)

YES

And a part 3, 4 & 5 😋

@@emilielinstewart yesssssss

Yass

100%

!!!!!

Honestly all of Kafka's works have such great starts. "Someone must have slandered Josef K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested" from The Trial and "As he entered New York Harbor on the now slow-moving ship, Karl Rossmann, a seventeen-year-old youth who had been sent to America by his poor parents because a servant girl had seduced him and borne a child by him, saw the Statue of Liberty, which he had been observing for some time, as if in a sudden burst of sunlight" from Amerika and "'It's a peculiar apparatus,' said the Officer to the Traveller, gazing with a certain admiration at the device, which he was, of course, thoroughly familiar" from In the Penal Colony all stand out to me as really compelling

Kafka is absolutely unsurpassable.

I love Kafka sm 😭

It's so iconic that I actually REMEMBERED it from school. It was 3 years ago. I read in German and it has a beautiful alliteration so that helped.

@@anastasianicolaenco4476 the "ungeheueren Ungeziefer" part got stuck in my head when I read it too! (I'm assuming that's what you're talking about haha)

it kind of encapsulates 2020 too

Yes you are right

I want to read Jane Eyre as it was a Christmas gift but I feel so daunted to!

@@dri5132 Don't be! I read it fully expecting it to be super dry when I was like 15, and it immediately sucked me in! It reads very easily in my opinion.

also it tells about her life in the way that taking a walk in a day is a thing she does everyday and is a thing she looks forward to, a repetitive, basic, stuck in a loop -life

Omg I love this ♥️

I JUST DID THAT hahah

I'm gonna try that, thanks!

Ugh yes! Vonnegut is the best!

Slaughterhouse-5 has two opening lines and both are among the most iconic in literary history; "All this happened, more or less" and "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time"

Too much risk of spoilers, IMHO. Orwell's 1984, and for me, Dickens's Great Expectations are examples.

I like that idea, as long as she opens with a spoiler warning

omg there’s a princess bride book?!

@@alicem1961 yup. Make sure to pick up the 25th anniversary edition and read all the introductions.

One of the best

i was about to comment this oneeee but i only knew it in spanish

Yesss this one! It’s even better in spanish, since García Marquez doesn’t use the verb for discover but the one for meet, as if he was meeting a person.

Literally best opener ever! It sets up the nonlinear dreamlike storytelling so so so well

Fun fact: Gabo decided to become a writer after reading the first line of Kafka's Metamorphosis!!! that's why he wrote such an iconic first line

I don’t know what the last one is but it is incredibly iconic

@@iremspor I believe it is A Christmas Carol. I read it in Gonzo's voice from the classic movie The Muppet Christmas Carol.

@@JezzabelleJupiter the only short sentence Charlie ever wrote

ahhh orwell really knocked that opener out of the park. chef's kisses.

Here is a lesser known one that really sets the thrust of the whole book: “On the hot and humid night of July 21, 1958, when all signs pointed to a tenth consecutive pennant for the New York Yankees, a manhole cover rose slowly from its resting place near the center of a certain intersection in Washington, D.C.” (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant - or - Damn Yankees by Douglass Wallop)

I C O N I C---gave me goosebumps just reading it!

I came here to post this ♥

I really agree with this! It's fun to see someone doing something interesting with books they already own!

yes!! Love this comment

Oh gosh that’s a good one. So many great modern books too, of course!

@@ArielBissett PART 2! :D

So true

What book is that please?

@@analicollari2108 the Restaurant at the end of the Universe by douglas Adams. It is the second in the hitchhiker through the galaxy series.

Absolutely! The reason I decided to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is because I read this line somewhere and I wanted to read the book.

I was looking for this comment, I love it so much

Thats so good

Its my favorite quote of all time! Absolutely maddeningly brilliant 😭

ICONIC I was hoping someone else mentioned it

I love this book. I feel like not enough people know about it.

An unbelievably underrated book and movie. Bill Nighy's best role in my opinion 😱

I’m 60 years old and I have read more books than I can tell, but the outsiders is the one book that sticks with me as a great book, I first read it when I was 12 years old.

Agreed! Was looking for this comment---that line is one of my favorites.

Yes definitely

The Stranger is such a good book, it's a shame it's wasted on edgy teenagers.

@Tamara what are you referring to?

@@NoWay-nj2mm probably just another person criminalizing adolescence :/

I love this one

I get goosebumps every time I think of that line

EXACTLY what I said too, that iconic line just leads you into an even more amazing story

And the last line, too. "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea"

oh I love that book!

Absolutely phenomenal book

Ah yes, my favorite book: the SAT practice test

Yes! I haven't actually read the full novel (I borrowed it from a friend and she needed it back) but it's such a great setup.

I had kind of written Joan Didion of as an author because she doesn't write in my usal genres, but this made me add The White Album to my (way to long) tbr!

i love this

The most iconic first line in my opinion. Hands down. It's perfection.

I *just* started this book so your comment just jumped out at me. Agreed - great first line.

This book hit wayyyyy too close to home

same goes for the closing line of The Great Gatsby!

@@frommywindow180 I absolutely adore that line too!

What are the lines ?

@@somebat8888 "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."

@@charlottesreadsthings211 wow

I honestly thought Off To A Rough Start was a bit harsh even for today. Maybe I'm being sentimental, maybe I just like that style of opener, but I think it still causes you to cock an eyebrow. Like is it iconic or classic? No. But it's a solid beginning.

HG Welles was so far ahead of his time; the man wrote time travel and alien invasion sci-fi stories while still in the 19th century.

what book? :)

@@star.anniese Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

I was debating on buying this at my local thrift store yesterday!

I’ve never read it, but the words “bitter almonds” always remind me of arsenic

@@daphne-bai iirc (it's been a *very* long time since I've read it), the book opens with the examination of someone who committed suicide by inhaling cyanide fumes 🧐

Yeah but can u translate it for us?😂😂😂

@@evaggeliatseliou9329 Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

@@daisymoon8 thank u so much, this quote is truly iconic

i want to hear this line being read in Spanish. i have this book in Englsh. i adore it. people say it's even more remarkable in Spanish. it's the motivating reason why I want to go back and try to learn Spanish, for real.

I was about to write the same (in English tough), the most iconic of them all!

It definitely does, both Austen and the Brontes used it and a lot of other authors from that time period as well!

It happens a lot in Jane Eyre

Yes! I've read tons of 19th/early 20th century German books that do that. From my experience, it seems way more common in German than in English, but I've read significantly more 19th century German lit than English lit

@@aw7145 I've barly read any german litterature from the 19th century, do you have any recs?

@@TiliaHaggstrom I would love to give you some recs! I'm so sorry I don't know the English names of these, I read them all in German and I'm just sort of looking at my bookshelf 😄 They're all pretty famous though, I doubt you'd run into any problems finding them in translation (and most of them are online in some capacity because they're super old). Also, I hope you don't mind me venturing into the 20th century too, I just got a bit excited Der Schimmelreiter - Theodor Storm (1888) Effi Breist - Fontane (1894) (I would recommend a lot of Fontane, actually. He was a very important realist. Maybe try Irrungen, Wirrungen too) Das Glasperlenspiel - Hesse (1943) Die Judenbuche - von Droste-Hülshoff (1842) Der Sandmann (comes from the story collection die Nachtstücke) and Die Elixiere Des Teufels - ETA Hoffmann (1817 and 1815) Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder - Brecht (1939) Bunte Steine - Stifter (1853) Der Besuch der alten Dame - Dürrenmatt (1956) Die Leiden des jungen Werthers - Goethe (1774) Der Zauberberg and Buddenbrooks - Mann (1924 and 1901) (Buddenbrooks is *very* long though!) Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen - Heine (1843) Das Schloss - Kafka (1926)

I was JUST about to comment this. The questions it brings forth, the immediate sarcastic tone it sets that carries throughout the book and character. It’s just amazing.

WOW i love that one

where is it from?

@@tuathetuatara4195 "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" by Rainer Maria Rilke

I'm Italian, so I read the original version and honestly the way it sounds in Italian is so so nice, I don't know what it is, it's just really good

YESSSSS one of my favorites!!

@@oliviam667 thank you, i'll look into that!

We have the same taste in books!!

@@clare88 Hehehe, to be honest, of the three I mentioned, I've only read Jane Eyre. Moby Dick and Mrs. Dalloway just have really memorable first lines, even though I haven't read them! ;)

What is this book about?

@@katherineg.5600 It is about the crazy world of orchid collecting, smuggling and growing. many people do not realize there is a lot of money circling in the illegal trade of plants. And it is a rather humorous view into this world.

@@kolmkilpkonna wow that's really interesting I had no idea. Also thanks for answering

Those are so good !

Read the book. So good. But if you cant understand the spelling, read it out loud. You'll see what I mean. My favorite book.

Agreed, if you've read the book the first line says so much.

Agreed!

Yes! Love that book!

Absolutely! It hits so different after reading the full book as well.

life got crazy around here but i have some cool stuff coming your way!!!

@@ArielBissett YAY!!!

Austen is so funny, you definetlt have something to look forward to! If you are not already following sparknotes on twitter you for sure need to, they just post tons of classics inside jokes and it really motivates you to read the classics to get the jokes (and you feel so smart when you do) 😂