# Best Hook?



## vindicativevisage (Jan 9, 2013)

In your opinion, what is THE best opening sentence for a book?

Mine's a toss up between the opening for "Rebecca" and Dickens's "best of times" one.

Apologies if this has already been asked.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Yes, it's been done. Here's one with almost 170 replies: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,35225.0.html


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

It has been done before; probably more recently than the one NogDog linked to, which is almost two years old.  But it's always a good one.

I don't remember specific lines so much...but I do know that the reason I got hooked on Dick Francis novels is because nobody ever opened a book better....

Betsy


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## hamerfan (Apr 24, 2011)

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

and that's from?

Betsy


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## hamerfan (Apr 24, 2011)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> and that's from?
> 
> Betsy


Oops, sorry.
Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.


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## Adele Ward (Jan 2, 2012)

My favourite opening to a book is one I'll never forget. Here it is:

'Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say
Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...'

I was gripped from the start. The whole opening is wonderful and can be seen on Look Inside.

It's by Martin Amis and it's The Information: Author of London Fields and Time's Arrow

One of my all-time favourite books.


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## Carol (was Dara) (Feb 19, 2011)

It's funny _Rebecca_ was mentioned because it's one of my favorite opening lines too. "Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again." No idea why that's such a good hook but it always sticks in my mind.

I'm also partial to the first line of a book that, weirdly enough, I've never read. Barbara Kingsolver's _The Poisonwood Bible _ opens with, "Imagine a ruin so beautiful it must never have existed." Thanks to Everybody Loves Raymond for teaching me that one, although they changed the title to "Devilwood" and the quote to "rain", instead of "ruin".


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## mickbose (Nov 17, 2012)

Call me Ishamel..........Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

Bland I know but an unlikely entree to a great adventure novel.


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## Geoffrey (Jun 20, 2009)

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
William Gibson, Neuromancer


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Geoffrey said:


> "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
> William Gibson, Neuromancer


Which sort of ages that book now.


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## Tony Richards (Jul 6, 2011)

1/ Oh, tut, Betsy! Even if you don't know that one directly, you can get it from its context.

2/ _Nothing_ ages Neuromancer. You can still walk into any good bookstore and buy a copy decades after its first release.

"The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm" -- _Something Wicked This Way Comes_, Ray Bradbury.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

Tony Richards said:


> ...
> 2/ _Nothing_ ages Neuromancer. You can still walk into any good bookstore and buy a copy decades after its first release.


You could join us in the GoodReads.com SciFi and Fantasy eBook club to re-read it this month.  (Oh, and IIRC, they're still using tape storage in it.  )



> "The seller of lightning rods arrived just ahead of the storm" -- _Something Wicked This Way Comes_, Ray Bradbury.


I almost replied with that one yesterday: simple words that immediately make the reader go, "Huh?" 

I've always been partial to the opening of Zelazny's _Doorways in the Sand_:


  _Lying, left hand for a pillow, on the shingled slant of the roof, there in the shade of the gable, staring at the cloud-curdles in afternoon's blue pool, I seemed to see, between blinks, above the campus and myself, an instant piece of sky-writing.

DO YOU SMELL ME DED? I read._


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## Sam Kates (Aug 28, 2012)

NogDog said:


> Oh, and IIRC, they're still using tape storage in it.


I've just read _Neuromancer_ for the first time. (Yeah, I know, where've I been?) The only thing that really struck me as incongruous was that he had to keep jacking in - no wi-fi.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Tony Richards said:


> 1/ Oh, tut, Betsy! Even if you don't know that one directly, you can get it from its context.


Sorry, guess I'm a loser. I've never read anything by Hunter Thompson and I'm not sure why a mention of Barstow should lead me there. Was there only one book ever that mentioned Barstow? Or drugs? Or deserts? 

Betsy


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

Yeah. . . I didn't get it either.  One can never assume that just because it is one's favorite book that everyone has heard of it and most people have read it.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Ann in Arlington said:


> Yeah. . . I didn't get it either. One can never assume that just because it is one's favorite book that everyone has heard of it and most people have read it.


OK, thanks, maybe I'm not as much of a loser as I thought.  Didn't mean to kill the thread...


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## KGorman (Feb 6, 2011)

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream."

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson


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## msf72vtny (Nov 28, 2012)

It's hard to beat _A Christmas Carol_ -- "Marley was dead: to begin with."


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## Atunah (Nov 20, 2008)

This first sentence of a first in a series got me totally hooked and I read them all now. 

"To say that I met Nicholas Brisbane over my husband’s dead body is not entirely accurate. Edward, it should be noted, was still twitching upon the floor."

Deanna Raybourn - Silent in the Grave


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

msf72vtny said:


> It's hard to beat _A Christmas Carol_ -- "Marley was dead: to begin with."


That is pretty good...

Betsy


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## Y. K. Greene (Jan 26, 2011)

I'm pretty partial to Stephen King's opener to the Dark Tower Series: "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."

A beat of action that draws you in and starts you off not sitting or walking but running. I am also a fan of the new Doctor Who, all difficulties can be solved with the skillful application of enough running


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## Martin OHearn (Feb 9, 2012)

"In the first place please bear in mind that I do not expect you to believe this story."

And of course the reader's first impulse is to say, "Oh, yeah? Well, maybe I just _will_ believe it, so there!" It's the first line of _At the Earth's Core_ by Edgar Rice Burroughs.


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## brianjanuary (Oct 18, 2011)

My all-time favorite by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) from _Firebreak_:

"When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man."


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## Roberto Scarlato (Nov 14, 2009)

The best hook I've ever read to this day has to be the opening Paragraph to H.G. Well's War of The Worlds. It's so perfect in its delivery and so poetic and so engaging at the same time that I bought the book after reading just one paragraph. I think that paragraph also encouraged me to become a writer.


P.s. Don't watch the Tom Cruise movie. You'll thank me later.


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## Grace Elliot (Mar 14, 2011)

Not necessarily for the first sentence, but the opening of Hugh Howie's first book in the Wool trilogy had me hooked - and I don't usually read sci-fi. The set up was so strong, and I wanted to know so many answers, that I just had to keep reading.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

I wouldn't go so far as to call this _the_ best, but it's the best I've read in at least the last 2-3 years:

_Dirk Moeller didn't know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out._

~ _The Android's Dream,_ by John Scalzi


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