The American Scholar presents a list of the ten worst opening lines in novels. I don't agree with all their choices, but I agree that most are awful enough to make me abandon the book after reading the first sentence.
I wish more authors of boring books would be courteous enough to warn me to stop reading after one sentence. For example, I trudged through 9/10ths of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, caring less and less what happened as the story unfolded until I closed the book for good.
It must have been 1963, because the musical of Dombey & Son was running at the Alexandra, and it must have been the autumn, because it was surely some time in October that a performance was seriously delayed because two of the cast had slipped and hurt themselves in B dressing-room corridor, and the reason for that was that the floor appeared to be flooded with something sticky and glutinous.
—Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie's
Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had settled after fleeing our pleasant town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the husbands whom the three Gordforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for themselves did not prove durable.
—John Updike, The Widows of Eastwick
