What are the best book openings you know?

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Stephen Hunter's redneck crime story Dirty White Boys:

Three men at McAlester State Penitentiary had larger penises than Lamar Pye, but all were black and therefore, by Lamar’s own figuring, hardly human at all. His was the largest penis ever seen on a white man in that prison or any of the others in which Lamar had spent so much of his adult life. It was a monster, a snake, a ropey, veiny thing that hardly looked at all like what it was but rather like some form of rubber tubing.

Therefore he was Number One on the fag hit parade, but the fags knew to stay away and could only dream of him in private. Lamar wasn’t a fag, although, when the spirit moved him, he was a buttfucker. He wasn’t a boss con’s fuckboy, either, or a punk, or a bitch or a mary or a snitch, and he carried a simple message in the graceful economy of his movements: to fuck with me is to fuck with death itself.
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Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
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from Albert Camus's The Stranger.

Whatever your feelings about it may be, I feel that one must admit that the communist manifesto has a very good intro. In particular, the strength of "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." In whatever field you are in, putting forth a declaration of how things are will always pique the interest of the reader much better than timidly arguing your points.

Also of Dostoevsky's books, I found the intro to the Underground Man the most intriguing,
I am a sick man.... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well--let it get worse!
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All of his books are good, and the Underground Man is a short read so I would thoroughly recommend it.
 
Reading Goethe's Faust right now and the triple prologues are all interesting. A poem on creation, a meta comedy about 3 men trying to make a play of Faust, and the prologue in heaven all make for interesting texture epically for a play of that vintage.

Special note also goes to the faux moral opening of Lolita, the opening of The Trial ("Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested."), the opening of Sirens of Titan, and the opening line of Catch-22 ("It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him")
 
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” - Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House)
 
The classic:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hold, and that means comfort. (The Hobbit)
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Personal favorite:
There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says. We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-Eye’s handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.

Lightning from a clear sky smote the Necropolitan Hill. One bolt struck the bronze plaque sealing the tomb of the forvalaka, obliterating half the spell of confinement. It rained stones. Statues bled. Priests at several temples reported sacrificial victims without hearts or livers. One victim escaped after its bowels were opened and was not recaptured. At the Fork Barracks, where the Urban Cohorts were billeted, the image of Teux turned completely around. For nine evenings running, ten black vultures circled the Bastion. Then one evicted the eagle which lived atop the Paper Tower.

Astrologers refused readings, fearing for their lives. A mad soothsayer wandered the streets proclaiming the imminent end of the world. At the Bastion, the eagle not only departed, the ivy on the outer ramparts withered and gave way to a creeper which appeared black in all but the most intense sunlight.

But that happens every year. (The Black Company)
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"In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind."

And

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur."
 
Boston Brand dijo:
"One one otherwise normal Tuesday evening I had the chance to live the American dream: I was able to throw my incompetent jackass of a boss from a fourteenth-story window."

Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia
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Glad I'm not the only one to have read that around here. I think I picked it up from Goodwill solely based on the cover art. A good-bad book that I don't regret reading.

For now, I'll just pick the opening line from the books I'm reading now: "The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed." I'm currently on the third book, The Waste Lands.
 
Rupert Bear dijo:
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
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The fact that so many themes of the novel are contained within this half-sentence is astonishing. “Commodius vicus of recirculation” is both a reference to Vico’s theory of circular history and toilets.
 
plgfarts dijo:
Glad I'm not the only one to have read that around here. I think I picked it up from Goodwill solely based on the cover art. A good-bad book that I don't regret reading.

For now, I'll just pick the opening line from the books I'm reading now: "The man in Black fled across the Desert, and the Gunslinger followed." I'm currently on the third book, The Waste Lands.
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Honestly the Monster Hunter International Series are amazing fun.

That said, Forgotten Warrior is Correia's masterwork.
 
The foreword of 2001: The Space Odyssey
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star.
But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many - perhaps most - of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven - or hell.
How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars.
Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: “Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?”
Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remembert thi sis only a work of fiction.
The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
 
"A cutting wind slanted up Church Street in the cheerless dawn of January 5, 1942. That day I departed for the United States Marines." - Helment For My Pillow by Robert Leckie

"I enlisted in the Marine Corps on 3 December 1942 at Marion, Alabama." - With the Old Breed: At Peleliu And Okinawa by E. B. Sledge

"I looked through the scope of the sniper rifle, scanning down the road of the tiny Iraqi town." - American Sniper bu Chris Kyle

"An angry man-there is my story: the bitter rancour of Achilles, prince of the house of Peleus, which brought a thousand troubles upon the Achaian host. Many a strong soul it sent down to Hades, and left the heros themselves a prey to dogs and carrion birds, while the will of God moves on to fulfillment." - The Iliad by Homer

"Captain Crozier comes up on deck to find his ship under attack by celestial ghosts." - The Terror by Dan Simmons

"In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul." - Dune by Frank Herbert

"Light. The Light of that murdered sun still burns me. I see it through my eyelids, blazing out of history from that bloody day, hinting at fires indescribable. It is like something holy, as if it were the light of God's own heaven that burned the world and billions of lives with it. I carry that light always, seared into the back of my mind. I make no excuses, no denials, no apologies for what I have done. I know what I am." - Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
 
"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.”

Didn't like the book all that much but the opening still blows my mind every time I read it.
 
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