Openinghooks.us is a nice site with a database of opening hooks from many, many books. What’s an opening hook, you ask? It’s the first sentence or paragraph or a book, short story, etc. It’s what stops you from putting down that random book that you picked up at a bookstore because the title was interesting, or the cover looked nice.

Here are a few of my favorite. What are yours?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

The Restaraunt at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
“The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” by C.S. Lewis
“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
“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 a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
“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. ”

1984 by George Orwell
“It was a cold, bright day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”