Beginning Well Matters in Fiction, Too

Last week, we brought you the inaugural installment of our new monthly "best lead" (paragraph). In so doing, by the way, we decided to drop the journalese spelling of the term, which is "lede," which has a leaden sound to our ears. We're not big fans of jargon here, and that includes old-time journo jargon. And while, as we've mentioned before, our reading interests leave us far more interested in nonfiction than fiction, we did find this little tidbit fascinating: American Book Review recently tapped its 100 best first lines from novels. Just for the heck of it, read over it and see how many of those are familiar to you.