Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“One winter morning several years ago, I got an email with some ridiculously exciting news.” A.J. Jacobs, The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life.

“The police decided to enter the flat, but rather than break down the door they called a locksmith, figuring that a few minutes either way were unlikely to make a difference.” The Shadow District by Arnaldur Indridason (translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb).

“At a recent lecture on the Piltdown disclosures a member of the audience remarked, ‘When I read in the paper that Piltdown man was bogus, I felt as if something had gone out of my life; I had been brought up on Piltdown man!’”  J.S. Weiner, The Piltdown Forgery.

“In my dream I was reaching right through the glass of the window on a hockshop.” Fredric Brown, The Fabulous Clipjoint.

“Magic matters.” David Copperfield, Richard Wiseman, David Britland, David Copperfield’s History of Magic.

“It is never easy to move to a new country, but in truth I was happy to be away from New York.” Katie Kitamura, Intimacies.

“A little before eight on the morning of March 21, 1829, the Duke of Wellington, England’s prime minister, arrived on horseback at a crossroads south of the Thames, about a half mile beyond Battersea Bridge.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

“It’s hard to know, ever, where a story begins.” Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street.

“We forget that love is revolutionary.” Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake.

“His cousin Freddie brought him on the heist one hot night in early June.” Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle.

“The politics of inevitability is the idea that there are no ideas.” Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America.

“It wasn’t far off midnight, but it was still light.” Ragnar Jónasson, Snowblind. (translated by Quentin Bates).

“’We need every one of you,’ proclaimed an anonymous 1985 article in a major white power newspaper.” Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

“The dust hovers in a cloud behind the Reykjavik coach, the road is a ridged washboard and we rattle on; bend after bend, soon it becomes impossible to see through the muddy windows and, before long, the Laxdoela Saga trail will vanish into the dirt.” Auour Ava Olafsdóttir, Miss Iceland.

“Somewhere in the vast northern ocean, between Iceland and Norway, Thorsteinn Olafsson got himself involved in the biggest mystery of the middle ages by making an honest mistake: he turned his ship a few too many degrees west.” Egill Bjarnason, How Iceland Changed the World: The Big History of a Small Island.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“The killer came by streetcar.” David Zucchino, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy.

“From across the aisle Harry Bosch looked into his partner’s cubicle and watched him conduct his daily ritual of straightening the corners on his stacks of files, clearing the paperwork from the center of his desk and finally placed his rinsed-out coffee cup in a desk drawer.” Michael Connelly, Nine Dragons.

“Let’s look beneath the ice-chipped surface of a fish counter at a Whole Foods in New York City.” Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket.

“It all started one afternoon early in May when I came out of the House of Commons with Tommy Deloraine.” John Buchan, The Power-House.

“Imagine an archaeologist, thousands of years from now, whose trowel clangs against something solid.” Edward Dolnick, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone.

“He no longer feels cold; instead, a curious heat is spreading through his veins.” Arnaldur Indridason, Strange Shores.

“The Headquarters Building at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, is a grim maze of identical corridors flanked by blank, color-coded office doors that are always shut tight.” Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg.

“On the first Monday in March 1901, in the early evening when the sound of sleigh bells filled the air, a student unexpectedly knocked at my door.” Lauren Belfer, City of Light.

“These are the fisherman who stand sentry over the cod stocks off the headlands of North America, the fisherman who went to sea but forgot their pencil.” Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (1997).

“The last time I’d eaten at the Watergrill I sat across the table from a client who had coldly and calculatedly murdered his wife and her lover, shooting both of them in the face.” Michael Connelly, The Reversal.

“Years ago, as a medical student in Boston, I watched a senior surgeon operate on a woman.” Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes From an Uncertain Science.

“I have no intention of explaining how the correspondence which I now offer to the public fell into my hands.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters.

“The story of modern cancer research begins, improbably, with the sea urchin.” Sam Apple, Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection.