Opening Sentence of the Day: The Fortress of Solitude

Like a match struck in a darkened room:

Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o'clock on an evening in July.

-- The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem.

I like that opening sentence, even though it isn't a complete sentence so, technically, should fall into the pet peeve category. It has enough words to count as an exception to my usual rule against opening a book with a phrase.

I loved Lethem's National Book Critics Circle award winner, Motherless Brooklyn.

This one is much different. It's a coming-of-age novel set in Brooklyn in the 1970s. It's a real trip.

Maybe I'll tweet about it later. Ha! What am I going to do with this Twitter account, anyway? Who else uses Twitter? What do you use it for?

HOPPING

I am hoping to get some hopping in today, although I expect it will be this weekend before I get to it. For one thing, I am still trying to find a blogger blog with a Twitter retween button so I can figure out how to add it to mine.

The question this week is: Do you judge a book by its cover?

I can't say that I do, unless it's a fancy coffee table book or something. I like a nifty, eye-catching cover, like the Lethem book above, but I usually buy a book because it is on one of my many lists, not because I notice the cover. Since most of the books I buy are older, and often out-of-print, I take what I can find.

Although, I admit that I have a weakness for book with the Golden Gate Bridge on the cover, like this one that I bought and have no idea what it is about: