>>>>>Mike's message about the opening paragraph of "The Third Man" got me to wondering what people's favourite book openings are. Here's one of mine. It's from Thomas Pynchon's "Vineland":
>>>>>
>>>>>Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever
>>>>>quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>How about, "It was a dark and stormy night"?
>>>
>>>Only if you can convince me it's one of your favourites. Besides that's not the whole thing.
>>>
>>>It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
>>>
>>>Horrible, just horrible. ;)
>>
>>I was thinking more of Snoopy
>
>ROFL!!! :o)

And now from my all-time absolutely favourite novel ever: The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth:

In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and sting-taut with similes stretched to the snapping point.

IMHO, possibly the finest historical satire ever rendered in the English language. For what that's worth.