This Tuesday night at the first of our weekly Amigo Road Book Club meetings,
here at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, we compared the first lines of “Holy Toledo,” Ken Korach’s book on Renaissance Man Bill King (that’s his painting to the left), to some of the great openings in world literature. Our conclusion: Ken’s opening compares quite nicely!
“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.”
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“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.”
“I first met Bill King in the mid-1960s. He didn’t meet me until years later.”
Which is your favorite? And which is your favorite opening of any book you’ve read?