"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.