/lit/ - Literature

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor Ignatus J. Reilly's supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatus noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offences against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.

Where was it voted that these were the best paragraphs?

Who voted for them?

The Bible - King James Version (1611)

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

it was posted in an English magazine called Shortlist, and i'm assuming they were voted by the British public, however in the past they have asked actual writers to vote for them.

>>1385941
HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAA

proceed

American Tabloid - James Ellroy

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception.

>>1385941

List ruined forever.

The Bible is many things, but well written isn't one of them.

>>1385941
Well that's just stupid The Gospel of John has a way better opening.

>>1385962
Have you read it in it's original language?

>>1385962
It has many authors, some were able to write decently, though as for the new testament writing well in the Koine greek is about as impressive as painting well in a coloring book, fucking stripped down dialect.

A Farwell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were too dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

inb4 moby dick

>>1385971

>it's

Get out... just... get out.

The Outsider - Albert Camus

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday.

>>1385984
oh noes a spelling nistake, my whole point is disregarded.
see>>1385972
some are written poorly, and some, like psalms, are written well.

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

I first met Dean not long after my wife and i split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that i won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that i'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intullectual things that Chad knew about. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet this strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.

I better see the opening to Notes from Underground somewhere on this list

Pick-Up - Charles Willeford

It must have been around a quarter to eleven. A sailor came in and ordered a chile dog and coffee. I sliced a bun, jerked a frank out of the boiling water, nested it, poured a half-dipper of chile over the frank and sprinkled it liberally with chopped onions. I scribbled a check and put it by his plate. I wouldn't have recommended the unpalatable mess to a starving animal. The sailor was the only customer, and after he ate his dog he left. That was the exact moment she entered. A small woman, hardly more then five feet. She had the figure of a teenage girl. Her suit was a blue tweed, smartly cut, and over her thin shoulders she wore a fur jacket, bolero length. Tiny gold circular earrings clung to her small pierced ears. Her hands and feet were small, and when she seated herself at the counter i noticed she wasn't wearing any rings.

>>1386004
Maybe I should have made my point clearer:
Daddy was a Christian. In Catholic school I was bullied. Christina was an atheist. Christina touched my penis. Christina showed me Richard Donkins.
Now I make fun of Bible literalists and likewise take the Bible literally. That makes me hate the Bible. But somehow I can tell that Dostoevsky is fiction.
Christina showed me that being angry and loud to daddy is right. Bible stupid.

>>1386036

Great pick. Kerouac is severely underrated when it comes to his prose.

Although, you should of kept it with the "typo" "I first met met Neal..."

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing in particular to interest me on shore. I thought i would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way i have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever i find myself growing grim about the mouth wherever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever i find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral i meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, i account it high time to get to sea as soon as i can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; i quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this, If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

>>1386055

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Brighton Rock - Graham Greene

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn't belong - belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen's Road standing on the tops of little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west, like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the heath in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.

According to whom are these the best verses?

>>1386103
ur mother

>>1386109

White Fang - Jack London

Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land, The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness, there was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild

>>1385941
>>1386082
Only good ones. But damn they are good.

"As with pubs and shoes, you know you're reading a great book from the second you're inside it. In the right hands, a novel's beginning alone can make you feel like you've just fallen into a fast-flowing river, snatched away from reality and hurtled downhill. They range from hard-boiled pulp fiction classics to, well, The Bible; the only thing they have in common is that they're so good it's impossible not to read on. Unfortunately, right now you can't. But in the meantime, enjoy the best literary handshakes of all time..."

Introduction to the article, Shortlist Magazine (issue 157, 23rd December 2010)

and i'm done /lit/
pretty tiring actually.
Hope you enjoyed this short selection of the best literary introductions, however i'm not too sure who exactly proposed this selection or voted on them. This issue did feature some famous novelists in their interview and men of the year sections so i assume they were asked. However i cannot be certain.

>>1386149
Shut up, faggot.

>>1386178
>>1386178

u mad coz i contribute to the board and remind you of just how much of your time you waste on here, whilst doing absolutely fuck all to contribute to the discussion of literature, not even ttaking the time to log off your computer and actually read a book or essay or any kind of text so that you may make a thread about it and finally contribute to the board?

yeah you are

bump

and another bump

anyone else wanna read some fucking good opening paragraphs?

>>1386430

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

>>1386439
fukken THIS

>>1386456
Yeah, anyways. This list isn't so good.

""All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy
ones are more or less alike," says a great Russian writer in the
beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,
transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor
Ltd., 1880). That pronouncement has little if any relation to
the story to be unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part
of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i
Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858)."

final bump because i'm going out tonight

love you /lit/

>>1386430
Brighton Rock was a good call, but Grahame Greene has a few of these.

"Murder didn't mean much to Raven. It was just a new job. You had to be careful. You had to use your brains. It was not a question of hatred. He had only seen the Minister once: he had been pointed out to Raven as he walked down the new housing estate between the small lit Christmas trees, an old grubby man without friends, who was said to love humanity."
- a Gun for sale.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who - when he has been seriously noted at all - has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own willchoose that black we January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convienient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, pucking at my elbow, a suggestion, 'Speak to him: he hasn't seen you yet."

>>1386504
oops. the second is from "the End of the affair".

>ctrl+f
>"A screaming comes across the sky"
>no results found

:/

>>1386528
pynchon is so 6 months ago

I want some more!

final ever bump for this thread

>>1385976

fuckin' this, all the way
beautiful

A CHALLENGER APPROACHES:

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid Octover, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powerder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

--The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

DAVID COPPERFIELD by CHARLES DICKENS

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

>open thread
>ctrl+f
>query "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad..."
>no results
>mfw

For some reason I like the incipit of Death on Credit by Céline. Here's the translation I found (because I read it in French):

Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad... I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away. They've grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.

Yesterday at eight o’clock, Madame Bérange, the concierge, died. A great storm blew u pduring the night. Way up here where we are, the whole house is shaking. She was a good friend, gentle and faithful. Tomorrow they're going to bury her in the cemetery on the rue des Saules She was really old, at the very end of old age. The first day she caughed I said to her: "Whatever you do, don't stretch out. Sit up in bed." I was worried. Well, now it's happened... anyway, it couldn't be helped...

>>1388496
catcher has a better opening imo : |

>>1388505

My favourite book but I thought /lit/ hated it.

>>1388505

It looks like /lit/ only reads English language literature.

>>1388909

Yeah, it's not that Marquez is shit compared to Borges, Cortazar, Casares, Calvino, Bolano, etc. etc. etc.

It's that we only read English-language lit.

Retard.

I'm voting for Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess, but I'm too lazy to type out the opening paragraph. Somebody else do it.