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B&N Reads Blog

Can You Top These Terrible (and Fictional) Opening Lines?

Can You Top These Terrible (and Fictional) Opening Lines?

Reading a terrible first line
The truth is, you absolutely can judge a book by its cover, regardless of whether or not you should. We judge by the scrolling gold pattern worked through the title’s lettering, we discriminate by the weight of the paper and smell of the ink, we categorize based on the number of pages—does this book make my brain look fat?
Eventually, we take the time to scan the back cover and flap copy. If it passes this process of prescreening, then we move onto the third and final test: the opening lines. If we’re lucky, we find a little gem to give us hours of divinely layered characters and keenly developed plot lines. If we’re not, we get something like the following fictional and frightfully bad opening lines:
“There once was a courageous, devilishly handsome barista who clung to one lifelong vocation: Wherever there were office nomads in need of free WiFi, wherever there were vegans with severe dairy allergies in need of soy-laced caffeination, he would be there with both steam wands at the ready.”
“The suffocating sorrow welled up inside her chest, singeing her bosom, then crept up the ladder of her spine, gyrated at the nape of her neck, undulated behind her nose, then finally seethed through her teeth in a hushed, ‘Sssssssssssssss…'”
“This is not a story for the weak-minded, the soft-hearted, the flabby-armed, sensitive-stomached, or the dry-elbowed, because if you are not in peak physical, mental, and spiritual condition at the moment you turn the next page, your entire being will shrivel and convulse in the presence of literary splendor such that the world has never seen.”
What’s an opening line that would keep you from reading to sentence 2?