#firstsentences — Public Fediverse posts

"The sea is, if anything, famously huge."

-- First sentence of Kathleen Rooney, Man Overboard!

(Starting tonight. #ReadingNotes will go here.)

#KathleenRooney #ManOverboard #Bookstodon #FirstSentences

"Shakespeare is a very good writer. This is not news."

-- #FirstSentences of Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation (2026)

This table of contents has me SO EXCITED. Look at it, it's beautiful!

#ReadingNotes will go here.

#Bookstodon #NowReading #DanielHahn #Translation #Shakespeare

"Helm doesn't know when Helm was born.
Or brewed.
Conjured or conceived.
First formed above the highest mountain.
First blown into the valley.
Long before humankind -- that brief, busy interlude."

-- #FirstSentences of Sarah Hall, Helm (2025)

#ReadingNotes will go here. I am giddy for this one, truly, but also a little intimidated tbh. The first chapter was no joke!

#Bookstodon #SarahHall #Helm #NowReading

"There are many ways not to be someone."

-- First sentence of Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons (2021)

Started last night. #ReadingNotes will go here.

#FirstSentences #Bookstodon #NowReading #DanielHellerRoazen

"What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second."

-- First Sentence of George Saunders, Vigil (2026)

Started this last night. Any #ReadingNotes will go here.

#FirstSentences #GeorgeSaunders #Vigil #Bookstodon

"The row of tall, narrow houses all in the same shade of ecru trailed up the gently sloping hill, with no end in sight."

-- first sentence of Butter: A Novel of Food And Murder by Asako Yuzuki (2017, trans. Polly Barton in 2024)

#ReadingNotes #FirstSentences #AsakoYuzuki #Bookstodon

"I have thought long and hard about how I would dispose of a dead body."

-- First sentence of Dead Weight by Hildur Knútsdóttir (2025, trans. Mary Robinette Kowal)

Starting this now. #ReadingNotes will go here.

#FirstSentences #HildurKnútsdóttir #Bookstodon

"I am a child shaped in beeswax. I am made like a doll the size of a human forearm."

-- #FirstSentences of The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken, 2023/2025, New Directions.)

#ReadingNotes will go here.

Started this last night and this will probably be a super quick read, which is good -- but already loving the style and the ambiance.

I wanted something fun... if not light then at least odd or a bit weird, maybe creepy, brisk pace.

A tale of 17th-century witchcraft accusations told from the perspective of a wax doll many centuries later? Yes, I think that will do.

#OlgaRavn #TheWaxChild #InternationalBookerPrize #Bookstodon

"The sound of hooves beating on the sandy ground comes first. Then the breathing, strained and short-winded. Panting. A snort."

-- #FirstSentences of *Autobiography of Cotton* by Cristina Rivera Garza (trans. Christina MacSweeney)

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Started this evening. Really looking forward to this one. Will put #ReadingNotes here.

#Bookstodon #CristinaRiveraGarza #NowReading

"Scorching salt sprinkled onto a healing wound -- that's how the wedding of his young neighbor felt to Petko."

-- #FirstSentences of *White Moss* by Anna Nerkagi, translated by Irina Sadovina. Pushkin, 2026.

(Started last night. #ReadingNotes will go here.)

#Bookstodon #AnnaNerkagi #WhiteMoss

"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*

---

(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*

---
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

---

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

"A long-time confidante of the rain and snow, I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them."

-- First Sentences of *The Last Quarter of the Moon* by Chi Zijian, trans. by Bruce Humes

#ChiZijian #Bookstodon #NowReading #TheLastQuarterOfTheMoon #FirstSentences

"I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal."

-- First sentence of Ursula Le Guin's *Lavinia*

Started this two nights ago.

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#FirstSentences #UrsulaLeGuin #Lavinia

"My beloved aunt,

I am as innocent and forged in the image and likeness of God as any other, as every other, though I have been a cabin boy, shopkeeper, and soldier, and before then, long before, a small girl at your skirts."

- #FirstSentences of *We Are Green and Trembling* by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Robin Myers)

---

Started last night -- but was exhausted, so only got through three pages. Was awake enough to get excited by this first sentence though. Read a bit more this morning, and this is great so far.

#GabrielaCabezónCámara #Bookstodon #ReadingNotes #WeAreGreenAndTrembling

"In memoirs by participants in the Soviet dissident movement, an obscure name usually appears near the beginning of the story."

-- First sentence of Benjamin Nathans, *To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement* (2024)

---

Started this over the weekend and man oh man, from a US perspective, it feels SO timely. It's tickling all the right brain cells right now.

#FirstSentences #BenjaminNathans #Bookstodon

"Long before they planted beets in Argus and built the highways, there was a railroad."

-- First Sentence of Louise Erdrich, *The Beet Queen* (1986)

---
Super excited to start this one, the second of her novels set in the *Love Medicine* world.

One chapter in and I'm already hooked. And it's still cold and snowy and a Saturday, and I'm wondering how much of the day I can just read away.

#FirstSentences #LouiseErdrich #Bookstodon #TheBeetQueen

"I'd say I opened my eyes, but I'm not sure. I wouldn't say I awoke."

-- #FirstSentences of Simón López Trujillo, *Pedro the Vast* (2026, trans. Robin Myers)

---
Started reading this last night. Forty pages in but I think I lost a thread somewhere. Something isn't quite clicking.

I think it's me, not the book. Will keep going with it.

Remaining #FirstSentences from this Faulkner collection, *Knight's Gambit*.

From "Tomorrow":
"Uncle Gavin had not always been county attorney. But the time when he had not been was more than twenty years ago and it had lasted for such a short period that only the old men remembered it, and even some of them did not. Because in that time he had had but one case."

Noting a bunch of #FirstSentences from Faulkner's short story collection, *Knight's Gambit*, which I started poking at a few days ago.

Here's the first few from "Smoke," the first story in the collection:

"Anselm Holland came to Jefferson many years ago. Where from, no one knew. But he was young then and a man of parts, or of presence at least, because within three years he had married the only daughter of a man who owned two thousand acres of some of the best land in the county, and he went to live in his father-in-law's house, where two years later his wife bore him twin sons and where a few years later still the father-in-law died and left Holland in full possession of the property, which was now in his wife's name."

#WilliamFaulkner #Bookstodon #KnightsGambit

"'What a piece of work is man!' marvels Hamlet, "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! ... in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! ... the paragon of animals!"

In a few short lines, Shakespeare gives us the most prominent theme in the history of Western thought: human beings are the most clever, moral, and capable spcies on earth.

But I wonder, if we truly believe we are so much better than other species, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?"

-- #FirstSentences of *The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters* by Christine Webb

Started today, 2026-01-02. Reading notes will be shared here.

#ReadingNotes #ChristineWebb #TheArrogantApe #Bookstodon

"The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay."

-- #FirstSentences of John Steinbeck, *East of Eden*

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This is my first read of East of Eden.

I am finishing the first Library of America volume of his novels, 1942-1952. Page numbers for these #ReadingNotes will reference that edition.

#JohnSteinbeck #EastOfEden #Bookstodon

"For much of the eighteenth century, two men raced each other to complete a comprehensive account of all life on Earth. At stake was not just scholarly immortality but the very nature of our relationship to nature--the concepts and principles we use to comprehend the living world."

-- #FirstSentences of Jason Roberts, "Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life"

#ReadingNotes #Bookstodon #JasonRoberts #EveryLivingThing