"We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. It was surprising there were so many of us left to die."

-- #FirstSentences of Louise Erdrich, *Tracks*

(Started 6/2. Notes will go here.)

#LouiseErdrich #Bookstodon #ReadingNotes #LoveMedicine

"In the place I used to live, my rusty top bunk rocked like a boat. Night after night, it carried me off towards a secret crevice."

-- #FirstSentences of Dorothy Tse, *City Like Water*

(trans. Natascha Bruce, Graywolf Press, 2026)

Started this morning. Reading notes will go here.

#ReadingNotes #DorothyTse #CityLikeWater #Bookstodon

"Jude had been teaching Engineering Communication and Design online for so long that the temporary virtual classroom seemed permanent. Every year or two someone in the department brought up in-person classes, but he wasn't surprised when the state of emergency extended another year, and they continued to wait for a return to normal that never came."

-- #FirstSentences of Rebecca Campbell, *Arboreality*

(Started tonight. #ReadingNotes will go here.)

#RebeccaCampbell #Bookstodon #Arboreality

"He was the second, or perhaps the third, Nero owned by my grandparents. With a grocery store that included a butcher shop and a slaughterhouse, they could feed as many dogs as they liked."

--- #FirstSentences of Louise Erdrich's story, "Python's Kiss"

(This is also the title story of her new short story collection. Reading notes will go here.)

#LouiseErdrich #ReadingNotes #Bookstodon

"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