Saturday, October 28, 2006

novels

November is National Novel Writing Month.
The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Tyler Watson blogs about what he sees as the top 5 opening lines in novels: [his picks]
  1. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
  2. Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (1972)
  3. Albert Camus, The Stranger, (1942, translation by Matthew Ward, 1988)
  4. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
  5. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)
The American Book Review lists the 100 best first lines in novels
  1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
  2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
  3. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
  4. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
  5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
  6. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
  7. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
  8. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
  9. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
  10. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

2 comments:

nadine said...

Having finally read "Catcher in the Rye" this year, I fully agree with Tyler Watson. Who's Tyler Watson?

Anonymous said...

I'm Tyler Watson. You can read my blog here. Thanks for the hat-tip.