Bloodless Coup

Interesting - To me the opening of The Stranger (28) is the most memorable. And I'm sort of surprised they didn't include the next line.

Others I particularly like today: 3, Gravity's Rainbow; 8, 1984; 15, Murphy; 16, Catcher in the Rye; 47, Voyage of the Dawn Treader; 84, The Sot-Weed Factor.

I'm at the office, but when I get home I want to pull a few books and see how their first lines compare. I'm just not sure how some of those stand out. I'm still confused about the criteria.

I can't help but think some are selected not because they themselves are so singularly crafted, but because they are the portal to books that are singularly crafted (call it the real estate rule of first sentences (location location location). Among these, find, Moby Dick (iconic first line, but nothing special about it; Gravity's Rainbow; Lolita (and it pains me to say it) which is brilliant only in the context of the full paragraph; Invisible Man; Ulysses; The Stranger; Mrs. Dalloway; Farenheit 451; Catch-22; A Farewell to Arms; and Red Badge of Courtage.

There are others, of course, that are more traditionally expository sentences that anticipate much of what will follow. Among thse, find Tale of Two Cities; Pride and Prejudice; One Hundred Years . . .; 1984; Catcher; Crying of Lot 49; Pale Fire (less obviously, but no less substantially, than the others, although which sentence is in fact the first sentence of that novel (or whether it even is a novel) is itself subject to debate); Old Man and the Sea; Middlesex (which I'm currently reading; no spoilers!); Herzog; Geek Love (which also could be filed under ballsy and bizarre); and Augie March.

And then there are those that, for want of a better word, are just ballsy or bizarre. Huckleberry Fin; the Calvino Book (my second favorite first sentence to have read for the first time here); Murphy; City of Glass (I was about to file this elsewhere, but then I recalled how unsettling this sentence almost instantly becomes and noted the underdetermined "he" so quintissential to the sentence's full appreciation); Galatea 2.2 (just a brilliant book, although this sentence could just as easily be filed in the first category (except that I don't think the book is so iconic as to warrant inclusion there)); Alphabetical Africa; Razor's Edge; and Satanic Verses.

I think more than anything I'm stunned that I've read so many of these books, many more than on other top 100 book lists of other sorts I've encountered.

In any event, among the ones I've never seen before, today I enjoyed this one:

80. "Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

And with that, the work day ends.

Off the top of my head, that seems a reasonable analysis. However, that still leaves the larger question of what, exactly, the criteria were to make this list. You've got three there (Portals, Expositions, Bizarre); why three? Why not one? It makes no real sense.