Arbitrary reading rules

[Arthur Fuller]

Confronted with the deluge of books in this "paperless world", a decade or
two ago, I decided that I needed some ground-rules. The first such rule was
"Any book whose first word is "The" is not worth reading."

Returning to the subject of this forum, let me nominate the first sentence
of Gravity's Rainbow as one of the finest first sentences ever written. "A
screaming comes across the sky." Brilliant! In my mind's ear I can hear it
and in my mind's eye I can almost see it, but it's moving so fast that the
"almost" is required. God forbid that it suddenly turns to silence, since
that means it's about to explode on or near you.

Pynchon captured all this in a single sentence. That is Art..


-- 
Arthur
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