Starting from Page 1: Six for Early Winter

The solstice is fast approaching and with it comes the official start of winter. For me, winter is the perfect season for reading through my bookshelves. As I've mentioned, one way I choose my next book is by reading the opening lines to see what calls to me. Here's what I read yesterday.

Luis Alberto Urrea
Queen of America
Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown and Company, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780316154864
Fiction

At first she found it dry. Soon, and forever after, she would find it vast, dreadfully open, more sky than prairie, more prairie than mountain, more mountain than city. The whole would outstrip her ability to see, and she knew her days would end before she had seen one half of the continent and its rivers, its forests, its shores. Dry at first, then running, raining, flooding, wet. Then dry again. But now, in these days, for the first time in her life, she knew she was about to face the endless sea. The Saint of Cabora had discovered America.

Alexandra Fuller
Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness
Penguin Group USA / The Penguin Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781594202995
Biography

Our Mum--or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself--has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reasonably pliable witness as scribe.

Mark Kurlansky
The Eastern Stars
Penguin Group USA / Riverhead Books, 2010
ISBN-13: 9781594487507
Nonfiction, sports

This is a book about what is known in America as "making it." And like all such tales, it is also a story about not making it. In this Dominican town, San Pedro de Macoris, the difference between making it and not making it is usually baseball.

Maria Duenas
The Time in Between
Simon & Schuster / Atria, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781451616880
Historical fiction

A typewriter shattered my destiny. The culprit was a Hispano-Olivetti, and for weeks, a store window kept it from me. Looking back now, from the vantage point of the years gone by, it's hard to believe a simple mechanical object could have the power to divert the course of an entire life in just four short days, to pulverize the intricate plans on which it was built. And yet that is how it was, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it.

Alica Bessette
A Pinch of Love
Penguin Group USA / Plume, 2011
ISBN-13: 9780452297111
Women's fiction

I knot Nick's camouflage apron under my boobs, unable to remember the last time I wore a bra, or preheated the oven. That's my widow style.

Sara Levine
Treasure Island!!!
Europa Editions, 2011
ISBN-13: 9781609450618
Fiction

In the aftermath of my adventure, I decided to write down the whole thing, starting with my discovery of Treasure Island and keeping nothing back, not even the names of the friends and family members whose problems plagued me; and so even though I'd love to go into the other room and stab someone with a kitchen knife, I take up my pen--a nifty micro-ball which had been incorrectly capped and would have dried out had I not, at the crucial moment, found it and restored its seal.

Have any of these opening lines grabbed your attention? I have all of them on my winter reading list.