Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“General Phillip H. Sheridan sat motionless atop his horse as the summer sun beat down upon him.” Sean Mirski, We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and Rise of the American Colossus. 

“My name is Lila Macapagal and my life has become a rom-com cliché.” Mia P. Manansala, Arsenic and Adobo. 

“Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house.” Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. 

“I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first—among all the things that have vanished from the island.” Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police. 

“On the morning of August 2, 1973, from his summer cottage in Goose Prairie, Washington, Justice William O. Douglas set in motion one of the strangest proceedings in the history of the United States Supreme Court.” Stephen Vladeck, The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic. 

“They crested the hill to see the winter sun hovering on the far horizon, a wide vista of pale grey hills and leafless woodland ahead and the dark ribbon of a river threading the valley floor below.” Christobel Kent, A Murder in Tuscany. 

“There was once a doe that was portal through time.” Sinclair McKay, The Hidden History of Code-Breaking: The Secret World of Cyphers, Uncrackable Codes, and Elusive Encryptions. 

“It was ten years since Mrs. Bradley had been at the institution known as Shafton.” Gladys Mitchell, When Last I Died. 

“Far below the walkway that circled the top of the Cook County courthouse, Chicago spread itself out beneath Mathias Schaefer, an ordinary fireman in the most fire-prone city in the world.” Scott W. Berg, The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and the War for a City’s Soul. 

“Bunky Millerman caught me from behind on the first day of Woody Wilson’s little escapade in Vera Cruz.” Robert Olen Butler, The Hot Country. 

“Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we’d say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so’s you’d know it.” Calvin Trillin, Trillin on Texas. 

“On a warm midsummer’s evening just before the end of the last century, in a book-lined lawyers’ office in the pretty town of Kent, Connecticut, I handed over a check for a moderate sum in dollars to a second-generation Sicilian-American, a plumber named Cesare, who lived in the Bronx but who had driven up in the lush New England countryside especially for the formalities of this day.” Simon Winchester, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. 

“His green-and-vermillion topknot was as colorful as a parrot’s, and in Colleton County’s courtroom that afternoon, with its stripped-down modern light oak benches and pale navy carpet, a cherryhead parrot couldn’t have looked much more exotic than this Michael Czarnecki.” Margaret Maron, Bootlegger’s Daughter: A Deborah Knott Mystery. 

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“There is a perennial temptation to read the greatness of distinguished men backward into their youth; to imagine that, if one just knows where to look, their early lives will provide evidence that the fully formed person was there in microcosm all along.” Troy Senik, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland.

“Á filthy boy stood on the doorstep.” Zadie Smith, The Fraud.

“If you were searching for world-famous deep-sea monsters, a stately building at the top of a hill in Upsala, Sweden, is not the first place you’d look.” Susan Casey, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

“This early, the East River takes on a thin layer of translucence, a bright steely skin that appears to float over the river itself as the water turns from its nocturnal black to the opaque deep green of the approaching day.” Michael Cunninghan, Day.

“A young woman sprinted ahead of the fleeing soldiers on the forest path, her long red hair streaming on the wind as if it were a banner urging them onward to escape their own destruction.” Peter Stark, Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation.

“Needless to say, when Julia Prentice began to cast her huge, hazy eyes in the direction of my husband, I should have snapped to immediate attention. But at the moment I was too distracted thinking about her breasts.” Lindsay Maracotta, The Dead Hollywood Moms Society.

“European Wars would bookend Rudolf Diesel’s life.” Douglas Brunt, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genuis, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I.

“The night I watch Athena Liu die, we’re celebrating her TV deal with Netflix.” R.F. Kung, Yellowface.

“‘Please throw down the box.’” John Boessenecker, Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber.

“Possum Creek trickles out of a swampy waste a little south of Raleigh.” Margaret Maron, Bootlegger’s Daughter: A Deborah Knott Mystery.

“Jim Wedick yanked at his collar as he walked across the parking lot toward the Thunderbird Motel, a sprawling Native American-themed lodge in suburban Minneapolis.” David Howard, Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World’s Most Charming Con Man.

“In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon the Red House was taking its siesta.” A.A. Milne, The Red House Mystery,

“Since first setting foot on the Te-Chag-U ranch, Gil Bonifácio Carvalho Neto had felt a growing sense of dread—but it was only after uncovering a hidden clearing in the jungle that he began to truly fear for his life.” Heriberto Araujo, Masters of the Lost Land: The Untold Story of the Amazon and the Violent Fight for the World’s Last Frontier.