First lines

Sherry at the Semicolon blog has a list of ten great first lines from novels (try to guess before you look at the comments for answers), and she links to other sites that are collecting nominations for great first lines.

I just did a quick look at some of my favorite books on the shelves near my desk, and find that most of the novels I've kept lean toward good first paragraphs or pages, but the first lines themselves aren't anything to stand up and be noticed.

So far the only one that stands out is from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling (there's no sense asking people to guess that title, even if it is by Kipling). It has both stories and poems. There's a poem and then the first story begins:

The children were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father had made them a small play out of the big Shakespeare one, and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart...

I don't know why, but I like that very much, especially when you combine it with the rest of the first paragraph, which is rich in detail. I have the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics trade paperback edition (ISBN 0140183531), which has helpful end notes that tie the text to history and fable and compare The Strand versions against various other published versions.

Here's an online version, which has the first story all part of the same chapter as the first poem.