Best First Lines?

So, Litline (American Book Review) has what they purport to be the 100 Best First Lines from Novels.

I don’t know about the 100 Best, but there’s certainly some good ones in there, although I could certainly argue with the order.

For example, “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” should certainly not be 53 places lower than “They shoot the white girl first.”

And “One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.” should definitely come earlier in the list than “A screaming comes across the sky.“, gravitas be damned.

Of course the list is biased towards certain kinds of works, which makes sense given the source. You won’t find “Here is a story about a man who had too much power, and a man who took too much, but don’t worry; I’m not going political on you.” or “Everybody else got off the train at Hell, but I figured, it’s a free country.” on the list. (Or any of the other examples Mr. Rowe compiled on his old blog either.) Fair enough, I guess–every subjective list is compiled for some sort of audience.

And, of course, this just a debate about openings. There is no debate about closings, since it is a Well Known Fact that the finest closing ever written is this:

She asked me what Meyer had meant about her having a broken wing. I said he was one of the last of the great romantics. I said there used to be two. But now there was just the one left. The hairy one.