"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.
"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.
"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.
"Long before they planted beets in Argus and built the highways, there was a railroad."
-- First Sentence of Louise Erdrich, *The Beet Queen* (1986)
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Super excited to start this one, the second of her novels set in the *Love Medicine* world.
One chapter in and I'm already hooked. And it's still cold and snowy and a Saturday, and I'm wondering how much of the day I can just read away.
"I'd say I opened my eyes, but I'm not sure. I wouldn't say I awoke."
-- #FirstSentences of Simón López Trujillo, *Pedro the Vast* (2026, trans. Robin Myers)
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Started reading this last night. Forty pages in but I think I lost a thread somewhere. Something isn't quite clicking.
I think it's me, not the book. Will keep going with it.
Remaining #FirstSentences from this Faulkner collection, *Knight's Gambit*.
From "Tomorrow":
"Uncle Gavin had not always been county attorney. But the time when he had not been was more than twenty years ago and it had lasted for such a short period that only the old men remembered it, and even some of them did not. Because in that time he had had but one case."
Trevor Burrows