Book It!!

So Leslie handed down an interesting challenge. Take your 3 favorite books & transcribe the first three lines from each. Then write an opening line(s) of your own debut novel, and somehow we will all be better people, so here goes with mines:

From “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior
at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but
Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of
his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his
foxhole, was his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the
tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending.

From “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris:

Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the
scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or
office. The door opens and the person holding the knob is asked to
identify himself. The agent then says, “I’m going to ask you to come with
me.”

From “ A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The
green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that
grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals
indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the
bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with
disapproval and potato chip crumbs.

Okay…so, for my debut novel, entitled “Get in Your Red Bed”, I only have one line and you’ll just have to like it:

Most summer nights, Tommy Lee Ferber sang nonsense songs on our front stoop as
he strummed away at his guitar-shaped scrub board someone made for him at the
VFW.