What Is The First Paragraph Of Your Current Read?

[Donna Moore]

On the excellent 4MA mailing list, one of the standard questions each month is "What is the first paragraph on Page X of the book you are reading?" I get loads of book recommendations that way, so I thought I would start a similar discussion here, as I am always looking for suggestions for books to read.

So what is the first paragraph or two of the book you are currently reading?

I've just started TO KISS OR KILL by Day Keene from 1951. Here's the first few paragraphs as they are short:

'You never can tell what a big tough Polish boy will do when he finds a nude blonde in his bathroom. Especially if he is a heavyweight fighter who was born back of the yards, is married to a million dollars, and has a psychiatric record.

He might do a number of things. He might tell her to get out. He might yell for his wife. He might blow what's left of his top. He might even do what Barney Mandell did, come to his addled senses.

It really happened, in Chicago. It happened to Barney Mandell on the afternoon on the day he was released from the asylum as cured, because he hadn't wrung a parrot's neck in two years.

Oh, yes. The nude blonde was dead.'


Isn't that marvellous? What a start. Tells you enough about Barney Mandell to make you want to know more.

[John McFetridge]

Cynthia stood out front of the two-story house on Hickory. It wasn''t as though she was seeing her childhood house for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. She still lived in Milford. She'd driven by here once in a while. She showed me the house once before we got married, a quick drive-by. "There it is," she said, and kept on going. She rarely stopped. And if she did, she didn't get out. She'd never stood on the sidewalk and stared at the place.

That's the first paragraph of Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye (there's a prologue before that). It's a kind of a "family thriller." Cynthia was fourteen when she woke up one morning and the rest of her family was gone. The story takes place twenty-five years later (now) when a TV show revisits the disappearance and weird stuff starts happening. It's very good.

[Shannon Chenoweth]

"I woke up with IVs taped to my arms, a feeding tube shoved through my nose, and my tongue pushed against my teeth, dead and thick as a sock. My mouth was hot and tasted of copper, and my molars felt loose, jogged in their beds from grinding. I blinked against the harsh light and squinted into a haze of face, too close for a casual - a man straddling a backward chair, strong forearms overlapped, a sheet of paper drooping from one square fist. Another guy behind him, dressed the same - rumpled sport coat, loose tie offset from open collar, glint at the hip. Downgraded to bystander, a doctor stood by the door, ignoring the electronic blips and bleeps. I was in a hospital room."

-- From THE CRIME WRITER by Greg Hurwitz

[Angie]

"Alison Larsen's body went undiscovered for about 6 hours. Local children found her first. The paper never reported this, but a couple of the kids organized an impromptu club with a mandate to "experiment" on her corpse. What will happen if we put rocks in her mouth? Can her eyes still see? If we cut her, will she still bleed?

SECRET DEAD MEN by Duane Swierczynski

[Margot Renne Payne]

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.

"Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond--James Bond--you best spend your free time finger painting or playing shuffleboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with her stiff hair and mashed-potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began--with a wheeze.

Given such rigid parameters, I always assumed I wouldn't have my Magnificent Reason until I was at least seventy, with liver spots, rheumatism, wit as quick as a carving knife, a squat stucco house in Avignon (where I could be found eating 365 chesses), a lover twenty years my junior who worked in the fields (I don't know what kind of fields--the kind that were gold and frothy) and, with any luck, a small triumph of science or philosophy to my name. And yet the decision--no, the grave necessity--to take a pen to paper and write about my childhood--most critically, the year it unstitched like a snagged sweater--came sooner than I ever imagined.

It began with simple sleeplessness. It had been almost a year since I'd found Hannah dead, and I thought I'd managed to erase all traces of that night within myself, much the way Henry Higgins with his relentless elocution exercises had scrubbed away Eliza's Cockney accent.

I was wrong.

--- Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl

[Janet McClellan]

What a great question. Anyone know what book began... "It was a dark and stormy night"? and Snoopy is not the correct response...LOL.

Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles (2002)
Harper Perennial: New York

"It was the third year of the war and by now there was hardly anybody left in the country except the women and the children. The men were gone with Colonel Reeves to live in the forests, and many families had fled to Texas or St. Louis. Abandoned house places look out with blank windows form every hollow and valley in the Ozark mountains so that at night the wind sang through the disintegrating chinkings as if through a bone flute.

Adair Colley had just turned eighteen in early November of 1864 when the Union Militia arrested her father and tried to set the house on fire. Her sister Savannah saw them first; a long line of riders in blue trotting in double column as they turned into the road that led to the Colley farm."

[Eileen Hawkins]

Here you go!!

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

[Linda Lee]

From The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

Cashin walked around the hill, into the wind from the sea. It was cold, late autumn, last glowing leaves clinging to the liquidambars and maples his great-grandfather's brother had planted, their surrender close. He loved this time, the morning stillness, loved it more than spring.
The dogs were tiring now but still hunting the ground, noses down, taking more than a sniff, less hopeful. Then one picked up a scent and, new life in their legs, they loped in file for the trees, vanished.

[Janet McClellan]

Most of the stuff I am reading right now is technical... little chance of something being stated that would draw for entertainment value. Hopefully, the summer time will be more companionable in that regard.

Thanks for asking.

[Naomi Johnson]

"Nothing stays dead in New Orleans. Nor for long, anyway. You get a hard rain on a hot August night, all the ghosts come out. Ride down Claiborne Avenue, past all the muffler shops, discount furnture warehouses, Popeye's Chicken, your headlights catch a wisp of fog twisting up off the pavement like an old Bourbon Street stripper giving it one last lazy bump and grind. Just a glimpse before you drive on through it, send it whirling away behind you, but that's enough to make you feel like some things hang on, refuse to get swept away. They can knock the old buildings down, put up uglier ones, the whole city turning to cinder block before your eyes. But something always gets left behind. "Make a right down where the Dixie Drug used to be," some old guy on the street tells you, his whole hand stuck out, shaking slightly, like he needs all five fingers to point that far, "then keep on going till you get to where they shot that guy last year." And, Jesus Christ, you know what he means. 'Cause nothing ever vanishes, this town. You can still see it all, like a dream you wake from, still whispering into the dark."

Kenneth Abel COLD STEEL RAIN

[Joy Calderwood]

Love the title, and the illustrations: "to where they shot that guy last year." Great way to illustrate the concept.

I'd be right there, except I rarely read books that noir. :-/

[Naomi Johnson]

I love noir, and this paragraph sure catches the feel of an old Robert-Mitchum-in-a-trenchcoat movie. And the book is pretty good, too, thus far. It's pre-Katrina, and really captures the feel of N'awlins as she was back then.

[Lynette Rees]

Prologue

Chcago,
Monday, December 29, 7:00 P.M.

The sun had gone down. But then again, it tended to do that from time to time. He should get up and turn on a light.

But he liked the darkness. Liked the way it was quiet and still. The way it could hide a man. Inside and out. He was such a man. Hidden. Inside and out. All by himself.

I'm Watching You by Karen Rose