"Should I dream one dream or seven?"

-- First sentence of William Vollmann, *The Ice-Shirt*

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(Started this morning. #ReadingNotes will go here.)

#WilliamVollmann #Bookstodon #WilliamTheBlind #TheIceShirt #FirstSentences

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."

-- #FirstSentences of Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain"

What a great opening!

#RayBradbury #Bookstodon #ReadingNotes

"Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

-- First sentence of Cervantes, *Don Quixote*

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Started this morning. Reading notes will be tucked in this thread.

#FirstSentences #Cervantes #DonQuixote #Bookstodon #NowReading

"In the town they tell the story of the great pearl--how it was found and how it was lost again."

-- First sentence of Steinbeck's *The Pearl*

#ThePearl #JohnSteinbeck #ReadingNotes #FirstSentences #Bookstodon

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Started this morning. Will probably read quite quick, but notes will go here.

"In which the Beat Generation is absorbed by TV and the movies as an as-yet-underground counterculture coalesces around Village coffeehouses. Jonas Mekas sees new things developing. The Living Theatre has a hit "jazz play," *The Connection*, Allan Kaprow stages New York's first Happening, Ornette Coleman introduces *The Shape of Jazz to Come*, and a Village Voice writer envisions a Hipster General Strike."

- #FirstSentences of *Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde -- Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop* by J. Hoberman

Started reading this today. Notes will go here.

#NowReading #Bookstodon

"A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them."

-- First Sentences of *The Last Quarter of the Moon* by Chi Zijian, trans. by Bruce Humes

#ChiZijian #Bookstodon #NowReading #TheLastQuarterOfTheMoon #FirstSentences

"I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal."

-- First sentence of Ursula Le Guin's *Lavinia*

Started this two nights ago.

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#FirstSentences #UrsulaLeGuin #Lavinia

"My beloved aunt,

I am as innocent and forged in the image and likeness of God as any other, as every other, though I have been a cabin boy, shopkeeper, and soldier, and before then, long before, a small girl at your skirts."

- #FirstSentences of *We Are Green and Trembling* by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Robin Myers)

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Started last night -- but was exhausted, so only got through three pages. Was awake enough to get excited by this first sentence though. Read a bit more this morning, and this is great so far.

#GabrielaCabezónCámara #Bookstodon #ReadingNotes #WeAreGreenAndTrembling

"In memoirs by participants in the Soviet dissident movement, an obscure name usually appears near the beginning of the story."

-- First sentence of Benjamin Nathans, *To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement* (2024)

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Started this over the weekend and man oh man, from a US perspective, it feels SO timely. It's tickling all the right brain cells right now.

#FirstSentences #BenjaminNathans #Bookstodon