"'What a piece of work is man!' marvels Hamlet, "how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! ... in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! ... the paragon of animals!"

In a few short lines, Shakespeare gives us the most prominent theme in the history of Western thought: human beings are the most clever, moral, and capable spcies on earth.

But I wonder, if we truly believe we are so much better than other species, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?"

-- #FirstSentences of *The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters* by Christine Webb

Started today, 2026-01-02. Reading notes will be shared here.

#ReadingNotes #ChristineWebb #TheArrogantApe #Bookstodon

"The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay."

-- #FirstSentences of John Steinbeck, *East of Eden*

---

This is my first read of East of Eden.

I am finishing the first Library of America volume of his novels, 1942-1952. Page numbers for these #ReadingNotes will reference that edition.

#JohnSteinbeck #EastOfEden #Bookstodon

"For much of the eighteenth century, two men raced each other to complete a comprehensive account of all life on Earth. At stake was not just scholarly immortality but the very nature of our relationship to nature--the concepts and principles we use to comprehend the living world."

-- #FirstSentences of Jason Roberts, "Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life"

#ReadingNotes #Bookstodon #JasonRoberts #EveryLivingThing

"The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home."

-- #FirstSentences of Louise Erdrich's *Love Medicine*

#LouiseErdrich #LoveMedicine #ReadingNotes #Bookstodon

"Someone tickled me behind my ears, under my arms. I curled up, becoming a full moon, and rolled on the floor. I may also have emitted a few hoarse shrieks. Then I lifted my rump to the sky and slid my head below my belly. Now I was a sickle moon, still too young to imagine any danger."

-- #FirstSentences of Yoko Tawada's *Memoirs of a Polar Bear*

#YokoTawada #MemoirsOfAPolarBear #ReadingNotes

"The foam women are billowy, rolling, tumbling, white and dirty white and yellowish and dun, scudding, heaving, flying, broken. They lie at the longest reach of teh waves, rounded and curded, shaking and trembling, shivering hips and quivering buttocks, torn by the stiff, piercing wind, dispersed to nothing, gone. The long wave breaks again and they lie white and dirty white, yellowish and dun, billowing, trembling under the wind, flying, gone, till the long wave breaks again."

-- First lines of Ursula Le Guin, *Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand* (1991)

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Started this last night. Will put #ReadingNotes here.

#UrsulaLeGuin #FirstSentences

"Before the earth,

before the moon,
before the stars,

before the sun,

before the sky,
even before the sea,

there was only time and Ta'aroa.

Ta'aroa made Ta'aroa. Then he made an egg that could house him."

-- #FirstSentences (or rather, first lines) of Richard Powers, *Playground*

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Started this morning. Looking forward to spending some time with this one.

Edited to add #ReadingNotes tag.

#NowReading #Bookstodon #RichardPowers

Two #FirstSentences for the price of one:

"During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher."

-- Opening sentence of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)

and

"Across the flyleaf of my old *Commemorative Edition of the Works of Edgar Allan Poe in Ten Volumes, Volume I* (the only one I owned), a strong hand had written, 'I hate Poe,' and signed my name. The hand was mine."

-- Opening sentences of Daniel Hoffman's *Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe* (1972)

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Will use this thread for reading notes on some Poe and on Hoffman's book over the next week or so. Details to follow.

#EdgarAllenPoe #Bookstodon #DanielHoffman #NowReading

"Coming up, you're gonna see the word "Tóta" a bunch of times. When you do, please know it's not some cutism like Nana or Gammy or Pop-Pop; it's the Mohawk word -- or rather, the Kanien'kéha word -- for "grandparent." No particular gender because we're all evolved and shit, innit. Kanien'kéha won't be italicized because it's not a foreign language (although I hear we're calling that practice linguistic gatekeeping nowadays, which feels right to me); it's one of this land's many original languages."

-- #FirstSentences of Aaron John Curtis, *Old School Indian*

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How good is that opening?!?

Started this on the 13th (?). Will use this thread for #ReadingNotes.

#AaronJohnCurtis #OldSchoolIndian #Bookstodon #NowReading

"The hardest thing in the world is to live only once."

-- #FirstSentences of Ocean Vuong, *The Emperor of Gladness*

---
Started this on a whim last night. Have to read it pretty quickly to get it back to the library in time, so might not have a ton of #ReadingNotes ... but I'll use this as a spot for sharing thoughts.

Despite starting it on a whim, already 100 pages in --- so not too shabby so far!

#OceanVuong #NowReading

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

--- #FirstSentences of John Steinbeck, *Cannery Row*

Started last night. Didn't intend to, but finished *The Moon is Down* and this was next in the volume. Read the first sentences and come on, how could you not keep going?

#JohnSteinbeck #ReadingNotes #Bookstodon #NowReading

"By ten-forty-five it was all over. The town was occupied, the defenders defeated, and the war finished."

-- #FirstSentences of John Steinbeck, *The Moon Is Down* (1942)

Begun last night. Will drop any #ReadingNotes here.

#Bookstodon #JohnSteinbeck #NowReading

""Checker on seven!" and back between the checkstands unloading the wire carts, apples three for eighty-nine, pineapple chunks on special, half gallon of two percent, seventy-five, four, and one is five, thank you, from ten to six six days a week; and he was good at it."

-- #FirstSentences of Ursula Le Guin, *The Beginning Place*

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Will use this thread for any #ReadingNotes. What an opener!

#Bookstodon #UrsulaLeGuin

"In the sunlight in the center of a ring of trees Lev sat cross-legged, his head bent above his hands."

-- First sentence from Ursula Le Guin, "The Eye of the Heron"

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Started this the night before last, continuing my Le Guin adventures. Will use this for #ReadingNotes.

#FirstSentences #UrsulaLeGuin #TheEyeOfTheHeron #Bookstodon

"Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it."

-- #FirstSentences of Ursula Le Guin, "The Lathe of Heaven"

(Will use this thread for any #ReadingNotes)

#NowReading #UrsulaLeGuin #Bookstodon

"Nothing moved except the mirage."

---

Opening sentence from Adania Shibli's *Minor Detail*, which I started last night.

#AdaniaShibli #MinorDetail #ReadingNotes
#FirstSentences #Bookstodon

"Half a century ago, during the rainy season, when I was seven years old, my father and I reached the Sea. It was evening and the buildings were coloured glass against the night. I remember that we disembarked into water, we crossed the sand, we entered a pale door of the sea."

#FirstSentences of Madeleine Thien's *The Book of Records*

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Started this last night. Will use this for any #ReadingNotes. So very excited to read this one.

#MadeleineThien #NowReading #Bookstodon

"Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams -- of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters."

-- the stellar #FirstSentences of *Orbital* by Samantha Harvey

(will use this as my running #ReadingNotes thread for this book)

#SamanthaHarvey #Orbital

"What does it mean to be human? It means being able to cross the frontier between life that is deemed human and life that is not yet human, not human at all, or no longer human."

- First lines from Jan Miernowski, Laughing on the Brink of Humanity: An Exercise in Epihumanism (2024)

https://sunypress.edu/Books/L/Laughing-on-the-Brink-of-Humanity

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Started this a day or two ago to try and scratch a philosophy-ish itch. Already arguing with it, which is a good sign. Totally picked this up off the shelf bc I liked the title, the rough description, and some names I saw in the bibliography, lol.

Not sure how much I'll comment here but will make this my #ReadingNotes thread for the book.

#Bookstodon #NowReading #JanMiernowski #Philosophy #FirstSentences

"The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind. Father Damien's best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all he'd had to break his fast was a cup of hot water. He was old, very old, but alert until he had to eat."

Opening lines of *The Last Report on the Miracles at Little Horse*, by Louise Erdrich.

Started this in the middle of the night a few nights ago, absolutely wonderful so far. Will share running thoughts here.

#FirstSentences #ReadingNotes #Bookstodon #LouiseErdrich