It Was a Dark and Stormy Tweet: Five Hundred 1st Lines in 140 Characters or Less

Debra Hamel has been tweeting the first lines of books since 2007. To date, she has posted more than 7000 first lines on her Twitter accounts @TwitrLit and @KidderLit. IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY TWEET is a collection of 500 of the best of these. The first lines in this collection are culled from a wide variety of genres and from children's books as well as books written for adults. Some of the titles excerpted will be familiar to readers. The first lines of Fahrenheit 451 and Slaughterhouse Five are included, for example, and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens both merit mentions. But readers will find a lot here that's unfamiliar. The book is intended to introduce readers to new books and authors, so that they'll come away from the collection itching to get their hands on an armful of new titles. Here's a sample:

"Benny Rhodes loved his own bald head more than anything else in the world he could think of." (John A. Miller, Coyote Moon)

"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday." (John Scalzi, Old Man's War)

"A dead man fell from the sky, landing at my feet with a thud." (Gary Corby, The Pericles Commission)

The lines included in this collection are grouped into different categories, with chapters such as "Once Upon a Time," "Dead People," and "Pregnant Amish Men and Other Surprises." The book also includes three quizzes so that readers can test their first-line savvy.