The Best Book Openings of All Time
By Juan Carlos
1
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
2
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
3
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
4
Fahrenheit
451 Ray Bradbury
It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.
5
Neuromancer
William Gibson
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
6
High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order…
7
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school he longed to be out, and when he was out he longed to be in.
8
The Stranger
Albert Camus
MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday.
9
This Side of Paradise
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worthwhile.
10
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I’ve changed all the names.
11
Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury
One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets. And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open.
12
The Lives of the Monster Dogs
Kirsten Bakis
The past is obscure. It is blurred by dust and scratch marks, hidden by wide pieces of brown tape, soot, and mold stains. I am sifting through old documents that are oxidizing and crumbling as I touch them; things that have been burning, slowly, for a hundred years, throwing clouds of tiny particles into the air.
13
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
14
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation
15
1984
George Orwell
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
16
Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi
Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believe them to be trustworthy.
17
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
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.
18
Love Story
Erich Segal
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, “Alphabetical.”
19
After the Quake
Haruki Murakami
Five straight days she spent in front of the television, staring at crumbled banks and hospitals, whole blocks of stores in flames, severed rail lines and expressways. She never said a word.
20
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect.
21
100 Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father too him to discover ice.
22
Old Yeller
Fred Gipson
We called him Old Yeller. The name had a sort of double meaning. One part meant that his short hair was a dingy yellow, a color that we called “yeller” in those days. The other meant that when he opened his head, the sound he let out came closer to being a yell than a bark.
23
The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
24
Written on the Body
Jeanette Winterson
Why is the measure of love loss? It hasn’t rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat.
25
The Shining
Stephen King
Jack Torrance though: Officious little prick. Ullman stood five-five, and when he moved, it was with the prissy speed that seems to be the exclusive domain of all small plump men.
26
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period…
27
The Odyssey
Homer
Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned, aye, and many the woes he suffered in his hear upon the sea, seeking to win his own life and the return of his comrades.
28
Catch 22
Joseph Heller
It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in in love with him. Yossarrian was in the hospital with a pain in his liver that fell just short of being jaundice. The doctors were puzzled by the fact that it wasn’t quite jaundice. If it became jaundice they would treat it. If it didn’t become jaundice and went away they could discharge him. But this just being short of jaundice all the time confused them.
29
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky…
30
Moby Dick
Herman Melville
Call me Ishmael. Some year ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the water part of the world.
31
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
32
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
I first met Dean no long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except it has something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.
33
Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone
J.K. Rowling
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
34
Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card
I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one. Or at least as close as we’re going to get.
35
Tao Te Ching
Stephen Mitchell
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real.
36
Charlotte’s Web
E.B. White
“Where’s Papa going with that ax?” said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
37
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
Barabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own.
37
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
38
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
When I think of my wife, I always think of her head. The shape of it, to begin with. The first time I saw her, it was the back of the head I saw, and there was something lovely about it, the angles of it. Like a shiny, hard corn kernel or a riverbed fossil. She had what the Victorians would call a finely shaped head. You could imagine the skull quite easily.
Hi, I’m
Juan Carlos
Fueled by a passion for storytelling and excitement for life design, I find joy in reframing narratives to illuminate paths toward fulfillment. My experience spans high-growth startups, filmmaking, and social impact. Through mentoring and coaching, I guide teams and individuals to discover purpose and cultivate a meaningful life.
My Story
I started in film, directing award-winning features such as ‘Know How’ and ‘Second Skin.’ These cinematic endeavors earned me recognition and allowed me to serve as a spokesperson for Adobe. I founded the White Roof Project, a grassroots climate activism campaign that mitigated the urban heat island effect and spurred community-led social change.
I carried my storytelling skills and passion for societal transformation as I transitioned into the startup ecosystem. Initially, I contributed to social impact apps, converting complex issues into accessible solutions. This early experience laid a foundation for my later work, where I led the development of groundbreaking products within high-growth startups. My work has underscored the potential of technology to innovate and amplify the quality of human life.