Book Beginnings

Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

“You’re a True-Man. What’re you doing with the Wyrds?”
Sanctuary by Rowena Cory Daniells

This is the third, and final, book in the Outcast Chronicles. The books follow the clash of two races and cultures. One of them are humans without magical powers and the T’Entuath, called the Wyrds, who have magical gifts. The humans hate and fear the Wyrds. The series is epic fantasy.

At the beginning of this book, the Wyrds have been driven into exile. They have a few humans among them, who are also outcasts among their own kind. I presume that the discussion is between these two. However, they aren’t main characters so the book opens with secondary characters. We haven’t really seen sympathetic humans characters in this series but maybe that will change.

 

Book Beginnings

Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

“It was the smell – the smell of metal baking under the summer sun – that alerted Lena to the terrible fact that her getaway had been a failure.”

The Janus Affair by Pip Ballantine and Tee Morris, a Ministry of Peculiar occurences novel

The Janus Affair is a humorous steampunk novel set in Victorian London. Poor Lena isn’t one of the main characters so she’s likely to meet with a fate that will start a Ministry investigation. Or rather an unofficial investigation because the main characters, Mr. Books and Miss Braun, are Ministry Archivists and not full agents. Who or what is Lena running from? That’s the mystery.

 

Book Beginnings

Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

“Asher loved her, but she was not his to love. They were both half-bloods.”
Exile by Rowena Cory Daniells

This sounds like a romance book but it’s not. It’s epic fantasy set in a secondary world. It’s the second book in the series but these characters are new. Daniells has romance as one element in her books so these are most likely a set of desperate lovers who are going to give problems to the primary characters. And nothing is guaranteed for secondary characters so my instinct is not to get too attached.

 

Book Beginnings

Book Beginnings at Rose City Reader

Please join me every Friday to share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires. Please remember to include the title of the book and the author’s name.

Aldur Eskind and I came in at Iznar spaceport, the only one in operation on this part of Nhem since the others had been so badly bombed in the war.

Liz Williams: Darkland

Yup, it’s science fiction alright :). However, a first person narrator isn’t a usual choice for SF and all other books I’ve read from Williams so far have had multiple point-of-view characters. So, this seems pretty different.

 

Book Beginnings on Friday: July 29, 2011

A Few More Pages blog hosts the meme Book Beginnings: How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you would like, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence.

I’m currently reading Elizabeth Bear’s All the Windwracked Stars:

On the Last Day:

He was born white before she burned him.
But that wasn’t what happened first. Not in the beginning.
In the beginning was the end of the world.

Cryptic and poetic. A story that starts with the end of the world? Or perhaps the end of a world? It feels epic and because I knew that the setting centers on Norse mythology, that feels fitting. Yup, those lines hooked me.

 

Book Beginnings on Friday: July 1, 2011

A Few More Pages blog hosts the meme Book Beginnings:

I got tired of waiting for the newest Temeraire book to come available at Audible, so I bought the paper back and I’m now happily devouring it.

There were few streets in the main port of Sydney which deserved the name, besides the one main thoroughfare, and even that bare packed dirt, lined only with a handful of small and wretched buildings that formed all the permanence of a colony.
Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik

This is the sixth book detailing the adventures of the dragon Temeraire and his captain Will Laurence, and I’m been very happy with the series, so the beginning doesn’t really matter to me much. However, in this book our heroic duo has been sent to Australia for the first time, so we readers aren’t familiar with the setting. Right at the start we’re told the Sydney is a small town and the only one that the English have on the continent, so the setting will be wilderness and frontier land rather than the more elegant surrounds of England or China. The dreary surroundings seem to also be a reflection on Laurence’s miserable mood.

 

Book Beginnings on Friday: May 27, 2011

A Few More Pages blog hosts the meme Book Beginnings:

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday and will be open for the entire week.

This time I’ve in the middle of three books:

In print:
The New York Times September 8, 2001
Commodities Week
Last week’s confirmation by the Nobel high energy research team at CERN’s Erqumitsuliaq (Greenland) Quadruple Array Survey Collider of the existence of a sixth alternate Earth has had widespread effects on the worlds’ commodities markets, especially due to the continuing uncertainty as to how soon trade could be permitted with the new world (dubbed “Terra” by the Nobel team).

It’s Diane Duane’s Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses and at first I thought it was fantasy. But I do love alternate realities (being a long time X-Men and Avengers fan) so I’m eagerly looking forward to how they are going to handled in book format.

The beginning certainly establishes very quickly that this a science fiction book which is good since the cover also looks like fantasy.

Last week, Audible had a sale where you could get three audio books for two credits. The only thing that could have prevented me from taking advantage of it, would have been poor selection of books (and I suspect that us non-USAians get a lot fewer discount books to choose from). One of my choices was this:

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that didn’t look five years older than me. So, if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

The Forever War by Joel Haldeman. Another SF book. The tone introduces the point-of-view character as a youngish man with a tendency to sarcastic inner monologue. Probably he’s also a military or a mercenary since he’s jaded about killing other people. Or at least about techniques which are supposed to work.

I’ve also just started an e-book:
I hurried off the metro at the Union Station stop, looking around to see if I was being followed.

Dreams Unleashed by Linda Hawley. It’s a paranormal thriller set in 2015. I think this a good opening for a thriller; it has an immediate sense of urgency.

 

Book Beginnings on Friday: May 13, 2011

A Few More Pages blog hosts the meme Book Beginnings:

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday and will be open for the entire week.

I’m in the middle of two books, as is usual.

Though the evening breeze had chilled his back on the way across, it hadn’t yet begun its nightly job of sweeping out from among the island’s clustered vines and palm boles the humid air that the day had left behind, and Benjamin Hurwood’s face was gleaming with sweat before the black man had led him even a dozen yards into the jungle.

This is the start of the prologue to Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides. It uses a rather typical reversal technique with the character: giving us just a pronoun “he” and what he’s feeling, seeing, and doing before giving his name. The sentence also established the place very well. Still, to me it feels overly long and hard to understand. We’re on stranger tides, indeed. 🙂

By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a paved canal. People flow between its banks, eddying at the doors of office towers and department stores.

The second book I’m reading has a short prologue, too; Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks. This one is more easily readable, to me, but just as evocative when Bull compares people to flowing water.

I liked both of the beginnings. Both raise expectations about the writing styles; Bull would have more to-the-point sentences with imaginative imagery while Powers’ would have a more flowery and long-winded style. However, Powers doesn’t use that style all the time.

 

Book Beginnings

A Few More Pages blog hosts the meme Book Beginnings:

How to participate: Share the first line (or two) of the book you are currently reading on your blog or in the comments. Include the title and the author so we know what you’re reading. Then, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line, and let us know if you liked or did not like the sentence. The link-up will be at A Few More Pages every Friday and will be open for the entire week.

I’ve just finishing listening to Rachel Caine’s Chill Factor: “The sky overhead was blue. Clear, depthless, cloudless blue, the kind that stares back at you like Nietzsche’s abyss. Not a cloud in sight.

I hate clear skies. Clear skies make me nervous.”

Chill Factor is the third in the Weather Warden series and I was thrilled to find it on Audible. Clearly, I liked the previous books enough to get this third one. I like Joanne and the whole world building. So, Caine doesn’t have to sell this book to me right from the start.

However, I like the way usual descriptions are upside down in the fist paragraph: Clear skies are usually though to be soothing and pretty, not an abyss. This is very much in keeping with Jo’s contrary nature so I relaxed and enjoyed the ride.

The book actually starts with a “Previously” section which is less than a page and Jo’s chatty style can be seen there, too.

So, either opening works for me.