"I never put up a barber pole or a sign or even gave my shop a name."

UK paper the Guardian has what it says are the 10 best opening lines in literature. The list skews very Western classics with a couple modern entries. So no one has to go through the slide show, the 10 are: James Joyce Ulysses (1922) “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” This is the classic third-person opening to the 20th-century novel that has shaped modern fiction, pro and anti, for almost a hundred years. As a sentence, it is possibly outdone by the strange and lyrical beginning of Joyce’s final and even more experimental novel, Finnegans Wake: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813) “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The one everyone knows (and quotes). Parodied, spoofed, and misremembered, Austen’s celebrated zinger remains the archetypal First Line for an archetypal tale. Only Dickens comes close, with the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light etc…” Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847) “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” The polar opposite to Austen and Dickens, this line plunges the reader into the narrative, but in a low-key tone of disappointed expectations that captures Jane Eyre’s dismal circumstances. Brontë nails Jane’s hopeless prospects in 10 words. At the same time, the reader can hardly resist turning the first page. There’s also the intriguing contrast in tone with her sister Emily, who opens Wuthering Heights with: “I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.” Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) “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. That book was made by a Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.” The influence of this opening reverberates throughout the 20th century, and nowhere more so than in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like… and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” PG Wodehouse The Luck of the Bodkins (1935) “Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French.” A classic English comic opening, perfectly constructed to deliver the joke in the final phrase, this virtuoso line also illustrates its author’s uncanny ear for the music of English. Contrast the haunting brevity of Daphne du Maurier in Rebecca, partly situated in the south of France, and also published in the 1930s: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers (1980) “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” This is one of the supreme show-off first-person openings. Burgess challenges the reader (and himself) to step on to the roller coaster of a very tall tale (loosely based on the life of Somerset Maugham). It is matched by Rose Macaulay’s famous opening to The Towers of Trebizond: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” Dodie Smith I Capture the Castle (1948) “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” A brilliant beginning to a much-loved English classic, which tells us almost all we need to know about the narrator Cassandra Mortmain. Quirky and high-spirited, Dodie Smith’s novel is really an exercise in nostalgia. Smith (subsequently famous for The Hundred and One Dalmatians) was living in 1940s California, and wrote this story, in a sustained fever of nostalgia, to remind her of home. Perhaps only an English writer could extract so much resonance from that offbeat reference to “the kitchen sink.” Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar (1963) “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Postwar American first lines don’t come much more angsty or zeitgeisty than this. Compare Saul Bellow’s Herzog: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” First published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas”, this first novel seems to parallel Sylvia Plath’s own descent into suicide. In fact, The Bell Jar was published only a month after its author’s tragic death in the bleak winter of 1963 Donna Tartt The Secret History (1992) “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” In this spooky opening, Tartt plunges the reader into the middle of a crime whose consequences will reverberate throughout the ensuing pages. Like all the best beginnings, the sentence also tells us something about the narrator, Richard Papen. He’s the outsider in a group of worldly students at Hampden College in rural Vermont. He was expecting a break from his bland suburban Californian life, but he doesn’t quite understand what he’s got himself into Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883) “Squire Trelawnay, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-- and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.” Among the most brilliant and enthralling opening lines in the English language

The best - and worst - of Stephen King

Stephen King (who really needs no explainer, like 'prolific' or 'ridiculously huge best-selling author' or 'horror writer,' he's just Stephen King) has written 62 books. And pop culture site the Vulture has ranked them in terms of quality. They are, in order from worst to first (with additional editorial comments by me on select books I've read): Rose Madder the Tommyknockers (I agree, that book was a crapfest) Dreamcatcher Insomnia the Regulators Rage The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah Blaze Gerald's Game Cell (the first half is a really interesting premise, the second half devolves into blech-itude) Blockade Billy Cycle of the Werewolf the Colorado Kid Black House Needful Things The Long Walk Christine Duma Key Four Past Midnight Firestarter Nightmares & Dreamscapes Running Man Bag of Bones Just After Sunset Dark Tower V: Wolves of Calla Faithful Everything's Eventual Dark Tower: Wind Through the Keyhole Cujo (the narration of the dog's thoughts? Pass. Otherwise good) Thinner (actually a really interesting premise that gets a little silly after a time) Full Dark, No Stars Dark Tower III: Waste Lands The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Desperation THe Dark Half The Eyes of the Dragon Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower Carrie (soooo good) 11/22/63 The Green MIle Hearts in Atlantis Night Shift Roadwork Dark Tower II: Drawing of the Three Pet Sematary Dolores Clairborne From a Buick 8 The Talisman Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger Skeleton Crew Under the Dome Danse Macabre Lisey's Story The Dead Zone (enjoyed this immensely) Salem's Lot (agree with the Vulture, one of the best vampire books ever written) Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass Misery Different Seasons The Shining IT (gotta disagree on this one. Really good first two thirds, but the giant turtle? Please) And, at number one, On Writing

What David Sedaris is reading

A nice little interview with David Sedaris about what he's reading, what he likes, what he'd recommend, how he writes, and doing Flannery O'Connor's laundry.

Ten fantastic novels with disappointing endings

The headline kind of says it all.

Zeitouchi

Remember, next meeting is Feb. 20, at Lee's. 7 p.m. Bring your canoe and proof that you're indeed a red-blooded native-born American.

Trash talk

The Awl has an interesting ongoing feature that reviews classic trashy airport reads (think "The Thorn Birds" or "Confessions of a Shopaholic").
And then there's the Consumed and Judged blog, which also gives quick rundowns of obscure and not-very-good novels.
Fun reads, both of them.

Have they made a movie of the Hardy Boys yet?

So true, so true.

A sense of a slam

Novelist Geoff Dyer - author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi" - wrote a snarky review of Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending" for the NYT. And it is now on the shortlist for the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, given by The Omnivore website for the "angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months." Congrats to Dyer, though it puts us Far to Go'ers in the precarious situation of having the author of one book we read and enjoyed go after the author of another book we read and enjoyed. Anyway, here's his take:

THE NARRATOR OF Julian Barnes’s acclaimed novel The Sense of an Ending is told by Veronica, a girlfriend from his university days, that he just doesn’t get it. Then, after more clues have come his way, she tells him that he still doesn’t get it. There are so many things he doesn’t get that he even considers using the line as his epitaph: “Tony Webster — He Never Got It.”

My feelings exactly. I didn’t get the book when I first read it. I still didn’t get it when I reread it after Barnes won this year’s Man Booker Prize, and Stella Rimington, chairwoman of the judging panel (and former head of MI5), said there was more to get each time you read it. To me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I didn’t get it even more than I hadn’t got it first time around. However, to pick up on one of the book’s themes, the accumulation of not getting things can add up to a kind of understanding.

The Sense of an Ending is a very short novel in which Tony keeps circling back to memories of Veronica, particularly to a mildly anxious weekend he endured at her parents’ house. This was back in the ’60s, before the ’60s really became the ’60s, when all but a few pockets of England were stuck in a slightly less austere addendum to the late ’50s. That weekend begins to makes sense only in light of what comes after — which in turn has to be seen in the context of what came before, when Tony and two friends were at school. These school days are actually rendered rather brilliantly, especially the moments in which a new boy, Adrian, bursts on the scene, startling the friends with his precocious intelligence. Later, after Tony has broken up with his girlfriend, Adrian commits suicide. This would be my first objection. Obviously people commit suicide, for a variety of reasons, but in fiction they tend to do so primarily in the service of authorial convenience. And convenience invariably becomes a near-anagram of contrivance.

Plotwise, not a lot happens. Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony, by now retired and divorced, some money and a “document” that turns out to be Adrian’s diary, only a copied fragment of which Veronica is willing to release to Tony. This excerpt ends tantalizingly, “So, for instance, if Tony.” The rest of the book, not surprisingly, involves Tony trying to get his mitts on the diary.

The paucity of action gives Tony ample opportunity to reflect on — and enact — the self-serving and self-deceiving workings of memory. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time, ” Tony declares in one of several reiterations of the book’s central ideas.

These ideas might better be termed commonplaces. But while commonplaces tend to dress themselves up in their Sunday best to assume greater weight, Barnes has always treated them lightly so that, by a kind of negation of the negation, they are taken . . . seriously! (Note Barnes’s pre-emptive body swerve: announced early on, one of Adrian’s pet aversions is “the way the English have of not being serious about being serious.”) Something similar operates at the level of feeling. The author’s famous restraint and withholding take on the form — and are evidence — of a powerful emotion that is being held in. How do we detect this submerged pressure of emotion? By the fact that it has been so thoroughly restrained as to appear nonexistent. Absence is proof of presence.

We must be fair. Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation — and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book.

Tony’s less startling observations often take the form of rhetorical questions posed by “a pedantic, unignorable bore” who does not like “mess” and, as he puts it in one of his endless perambulations round the point, can “only be straightforward.” Not that he is a pathologically unreliable narrator. He is a reliably unreliable narrator, a representative of the national average. Ever since he left school, Tony reliably informs us, he has been “average”: “Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that 95 percent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average.”

Now, the delineation of ordinariness is not a peculiarly English preoccupation. The narrator of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy leads “the normal applauseless life of us all,” and tells us about it in a “no-frills voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on application of the facts.” In Ford’s hands, this becomes an ambitious undertaking that has the sprawling amplitude of a prose continent at its disposal. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Barnes’s infolded scrupulousness seems every bit as well adapted to a reduced idea of English fiction, to a habit of reading that appeals (I get it!) and wearies (yeah, I get it!) in equal measure. The English Ford — Ford Madox Ford — prepared the narrative formula in The Good Soldier (“Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?”) in 1915; instead of being patented, however, it was, so to speak, nationalized. A recomposition of the passively active ingredients can be found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s narratives of wanly undermined self-evasion, most notably The Remains of the Day. The efficacy of the mixture is tried and tested even if the precise sources remain obscure — but if they are recognized then so much the better. Thus Barnes’s title gives averagely well-informed readers a preparatory pat on the back as they recognize that it has been lifted from a well-known book of criticism by Hugh Kenner.

This was not one of those years when the Man Booker Prize winner was laughably bad. No, any extreme expression of opinion about The Sense of an Ending feels inappropriate. It isn’t terrible, it is just so . . . average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!

Two final points. First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times on 16/12/11.