It’s National Reading Month! Here are 5 of my favorite opening lines to tempt you to pick up a book.
That’s right, the whole month of March is designated to honor Dr. Seuss’s birthday and to celebrate the love of reading. NRM is a month-long celebration that encourages kids, well, to read. This observance is aimed to promote avid reading, something that significantly dwindles as one grows up and gets busy with life. At least that’s what I tell myself when I look at the books in the to-be-read section of my shelf.
Truthfully, I don’t finish books like I used to when I was in college. Since graduating, I can’t help but look at reading as a chore or task. The feeling of impending doom at the thought of being quizzed and not knowing some obscure passage from an assigned reading definitely informed my reading habits, for better or worse.
Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my lack of follow-through. Who can say?
Here at Adelante Mujeres, education is at the core of our mission. It is a prerequisite to an engaged community, and reading is a powerful way to educate yourself and commit to a lifetime of learning.
This year I choose to observe NRM which will hopefully mark the beginning of me falling in love with reading for pleasure rather than viewing it as an assignment to complete.
And in an effort to entice others to join in on celebrating NRM I’ve compiled a tiny list of what I think are the most luring opening sentences from books I’ve actually read.
Here are five of my favorite opening lines plus the first stanza of a sonnet, in no particular order, to perhaps tempt you to pick up a book, whether on the list or not, to read this March:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
-George Orwell, 1984
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
-Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
-Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
-Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis
“I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.”
-Pablo Neruda (translated by Mark Eisner), One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII
Let us know in the comments below what you’ve been reading lately!
Angela Valenzuela is a guest blogger and Chicas Youth Facilitator and Project Developer at Adelante Mujeres. She is originally from Sinaloa, Mexico, and grew up in north Portland. She graduated in 2016 from Washington State University Vancouver with a B.A. in Humanities with a Primary Focus in English and Secondary Focus in Sociology, as well as with a Minor in Spanish.