When people say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover they usually mean it figuratively, in the sense that you shouldn’t judge people from their appearance.
But of course that saying is also literally true. The cover of a book might grab your attention, but you might be in for a disappointment. Or, on the other hand, a bad cover might put you off from reading a good book.
(Although, for me, things like cover design, binding and paper quality, all factor in when buying a book. I value books as objects, and I know I’m not alone in this. That’s why books have survived the advent of ebooks. I welcome ebooks, they save trees, but they’re not for me.
And at the risk of sounding like a total nutbag, I’ll tell you something else about me. If you hold in your hands one of my books that I’ve already read cover-to-cover, that book will look like no one’s ever touched it. The way I handle books is borderline OCD. I can’t help it.
And since we’re on the subject, there are two kinds of book lovers: the bookmark people and the dog-ear people. Dog-ear people are insane. That’s a fact.)
Back to covers. In judging a book that you’re not familiar with, you’re slightly better off reading the opening lines.
While it is wrong to judge a whole book from its first few sentences, those sentences are nevertheless part of the book, and can therefore at least give you a flavour of what you might expect.
What you’ll find below are the opening lines of some of my books. (Some are fiction, some are non fiction.) I’ve read most of those books but not all of them yet.
The ones I’ve read before, it was fun to read the opening lines again. It was like coming across a picture of an old friend whom you haven’t seen or thought about in a while. But I also enjoyed reading the opening lines of the books that I haven’t read yet, and I believe you might too.
I do think that a book’s opening lines are, more often than not, interesting to read even if you’re not familiar with the book and have no intention of ever reading it. (It might be because, I suspect, writers probably give to the beginning of a book a little bit more thought.)
It’s a bit like watching movie trailers. Even if you’re not planning to watch those movies, the trailers are usually entertaining in themselves.
(The books are arranged in order of publication.)
Anonymous
The Book of Job (5th c. BC)
(Good News translation)
There was a man named Job, living in the land of Uz, who worshipped God and was faithful to him. He was a good man, careful not to do anything evil. He had seven sons and three daughters, and owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, one thousand head of cattle, and five hundred donkeys.
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron (ca. 1350)
(transl. Wayne A. Rebhorn)
It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer, and although it is fitting for everyone to do so, it is especially desirable in those who, having had need of comfort, have received it from others, and if anyone ever needed it or appreciated it or derived any pleasure from it, I am one of them.
Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk (1921)
(transl. Cecil Parrott)
“And so they killed our Ferdinand”, said the charwoman to Mr Švejk, who had left military service years before, after having been finally certified by an army medical board as an imbecile, and now lived by selling dogs — ugly, mongrel monstrosities whose pedigrees he forged.
Edith Hamilton
Mythology (1942)
The Greeks did not believe that the gods created the universe. It was the other way about: the universe created the gods.
E.H. Gombrich
The Story of Art (1950)
There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all — I’m not saying that — but they’re also touchy as hell.
Jack Kerouac
On the Road - The Original Scroll (1957)
I first met Neal not long after my father died — I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.
Thomas M. Disch
Camp Concentration (1968)
Young RM, my Mormon guard, has brought me a supply of paper at last. It is three months to the day since I first asked him for some. Inexplicable, this change of heart.
Charles Portis
True Grit (1968)
People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.
Bamber Gascoigne
How to Identify Prints (1986)
In the long history of printing, and in all the varieties of printed images, there are only three basic types of print. This may seem too absolute to be believable, but when looked at more closely it verges on the obvious.
Isaac Asimov
I, Asimov (1994)
In 1977 I wrote my autobiography. Since I was dealing with my favorite subject, I wrote at length and I ended with 640,000 words.
Jennifer Mitchelhill
Castles of the Samurai (2003)
Within the stone base of Maruoka castle stand the remains of a blind peasant woman called Oshizu. After many attempts to stabilize the castle’s stone walls, it was agreed that a human sacrifice was needed to appease the Gods. Oshizu volunteered to be a hitobashira — literally a “person post” — in exchange for the promise that her son would be taken into the lord’s service as a samurai. So, in 1576, Oshizu stood stoically while the stones were laid around her, slowly crushing her to death.
David Attenborough
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)
We are greatly prejudiced by our size. We find it very difficult to believe that an animal that is many thousand times smaller than ourselves can have anything in any way comparable to our own motives, or to experience anything that resembles our basic emotions of fear and hunger, let alone aggression or sexual excitement.
Linda H. Davis
Charles Addams (2006)
They said that Charles Addams slept in a coffin and drank martinis with eyeballs in it. They said he kept a guillotine at his house and received chopped-off fingers in the mail from fans.
William Finnegan
Barbarian Days (2015)
I had never thought of myself as a sheltered child. Still, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. We had just moved to Honolulu, I was in the eighth grade, and most of my schoolmates were “drug addicts, glue sniffers and hoods” — or so I wrote to a friend back in Los Angeles. That wasn’t true.
