
European cover.Ā
I donāt know about you but Iām pretty picky when it comes to reading. Especially when Iām looking for fiction to read. Too many books and so little timeāisnāt that how the saying goes? So you can imagine when it comes to novels. I mean, lots of time goes into reading one. Novels are a commitment. And I love commitment. I do. But not to just any Tom, Dick, or Harry.
So about five or so years ago, I decided I needed to be realistic about not being able to read EVERY published novel on the planet before I die. So I came up with my ā3 Paragraph TestāāIād use the first few paragraphs to test a bookās opening (the most important part) to see if its prose style, voice, etc. are up to my standards for that commitment.
Iāll even go a page or so…or, if I want to be fair and I canāt glean enough from the first few paragraphs, then Iāll go a whole first chapter, if itās short.
So, I wanted to start sharing with you books that had beginnings I really like!āOnes that pulled me in and made me want to keep reading. Let me know what you think!
šSW
āIt’s better to kill people at the end of their psychology. They have nothing left to offer themselves or the world.
Not that I should have been killing anyone just then. Having fed less than twenty hours ago I should have wakened slaked and mellow, indifferent to blood for at least a week. Instead I’d woken in a state ofā-not to put too fine a point on itācomplete fucking pandemonium. Voices in the head (repeating, God only knew why, ‘He lied in every word…He lied in every word’…), earthquake in the heart, Sartrean nausea in the soulāand thirst as I hadn’t felt in centuries. Not the domesticated version, to be fobbed off with a half-dozen pouches from the fridge. No. This was The Lash, old school, non-negotiable, the red
US cover.
chorus that deafened the capillaries with its single moronic imperative: GET LIVING BLOOD NOW, OR DIE.”
– Glenn Duncan, By Blood We Live, 2014