cartophiliac

From: The Book Blog

"[…] Like [Robert Louis] Stevenson I am a cartophiliac, and because of Stevenson I am an islomaniac. Maps fire my mind because they offer—as Rosita Forbes put it—'the magic of anticipation without the toil and sweat of 'realization.'

     They give you seven-league boots, allowing you to cover miles in seconds. On a map, visibility is always perfect. Tracing the line of a walk with the point of a pencil, you can float over gorges and marshes, leap cliff-faces at a single bound, and ford spating rivers without getting wet. My father taught me how to read maps, such that landscapes would rise magically out of them. A snarl of contours became a saw-toothed ridge or gouged corrie, a break in the hachures implied a sea-cove on which we might safely land a rowing boat. After reading Stevenson, I sought out the work of other island-writers: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, John Fowles’s The Magus, and D.H. Lawrence’s extraordinary The Man Who Loved Islands, set on a nameless islet four miles in circumference, with two hills at its centre, gorse and blackthorn scrubbing its rocky fields, and cowslips thronging the verges.
     I began to devise and map my own ideal islands. There was a black-rock skerry somewhere in the North Atlantic, in whose lighthouse I would over-winter and around which, during the biggest storms, vast waves would whitely fold. […]"
— Robert Macfarlane, More Intelligent Life
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See a related post here...

Not with a shout but a whisper

Do great books by their very nature come with great first lines? Or do we only memorialize the opening sentence of a novel in retrospect, after the impact and notoriety of the book as a whole has prompted us to remark upon the opening line—or even take the time to reread it.
     The opening words of The Magus by John Fowles have always struck me as an outstanding first sentence: "I was born in 1927, the only child of middle-class parents, both English, and themselves born in the grotesquely elongated shadow, which they never rose sufficiently above history to leave, of that monstrous dwarf Queen Victoria."
     Whereas the first words of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion seem palid and unrepresentative of the depth and beauty of the work as a whole: "If he is awake early enough the boy sees the men walk down First Lake Road. Then he stands at the bedroom window and watches: he can see two or three lanterns between the soft maple and the walnut tree."

     In the next paragraph there's a breathtaking sentence (about the lantern-carriers, loggers, standing aside to let cows pass by) that to me is the "flagship" if you will, of the whole novel: "Sometimes the men put their hands on the warm flanks of these animals and receive their heat as they pass."
     It seems to be the rule of thumb these days, even for the gatekeepers of the publishing world (see a related post here...) to judge a book, not by its cover, but by its opening sentence. Novels demand patience; we need to sidle up to longer works, get acclimatized to them.
     But text, by its very nature, is linear information and, for better or worse, first impressions do count.
— Michael Hale

Here's a link to an article in The Guardian: "The 10 best first lines in fiction"

Buy books by John Fowles and Michael Ondaatje here...