Welcome to Booking Through Thursday, a weekly bookish meme about books and reading for everyone who loves both. Booking Through Thursday was first hosted by Deb. With permission, I’ve restarted it in 2026.
This week’s prompt:
What are your favorite first lines? What first lines hooked you so much that you had to keep reading? Famous first lines are fun, but if you have a recent one, please share the line (and the book and author so we can check it out too).
What are your favorite (or fun) first lines? These can be famous first lines or ones you’ve happened upon recently.
How to play:
- On your blog: Copy the question/image for your blog, answer it there, and post a quick comment here with a link or trackback to your post so we can read it.
- On social media: Copy the image, answer the prompt, and post a quick comment here with a link.
- Right here: Answer in the comments and start the discussion here. No need to have a blog to play.
Note: If it’s your first time here, your comment may end up in moderation. (My spam filter is aggressive.) I’ll be in after my writing sprints to set it free.
P.S. The prompt is always open, and you don’t have to play on Thursday. Comment whenever you like!
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Two first lines I really enjoyed recently:
The first:
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife.
From: Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher
How can you not keep reading after that?
The second:
Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives.
From: Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham
Technically the first line of the prologue, which I say counts.
Great lines! And, yes, they’re a pretty compelling argument for reading more.
The only one that came to mind for me suffers from a certain amount of overexposure…
Not a very creative choice, but I love it, anyway, from Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen): “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.” Set the tone for the entire book, which also became a favorite of mine.
Oh, I love that line too, and I even thought about including it. (Plus, Darcy and I used a variation of it as the first line of The Geek Girl’s Guide to Cheerleading.)