Opening Paragraphs
The Tell‐Tell Heart by Edgar Allan Poe TRUE! ‐‐nervous ‐‐very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses ‐‐not destroyed ‐‐not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily ‐‐how calmly I can tell you the whole story. The Accidental by Ali Smith My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain, the usherette was yawning, dandling her off torch, leaning on her elbow above the rustlings and tonguings of the back row and picking at the wood of the partition, flicking little splinters of it at the small‐town heads in the dark. 1984 by George Orwell It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armour‐plated, back, and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly stay in place and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. The Running Man by Richard Bachmann (a pen name of Stephen King) She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window. Beyond her, in the drizzle, the other high‐rises in Co‐Op City rose like the grey turrets of a penitentiary. Below, in the airshaft, clotheslines flapped with ragged wash. Rats and plump alley cats circulated through the garbage. The Catcher in The Rye by 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. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow 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. The Crow Road by Iain Banks It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach… Glossary: Hearken: old fashioned word for listen Penitentiary: prison David Copperfield: the book by Charles Dickens, not the magician Questions​
: ● What did these paragraphs tell you? ● Which one do you want to read the most, and why?