Love at First Sight: BookThug First Lines

In honour of Valentine’s Day, we’re celebrating a special kind of love: book love, AKA bibliophilia. You know, that special kind of love you feel for the perfect book.

Books, how do we love thee? Let’s count the ways.

Some remain our long-time partner, accumulating through the years the affection of our handwritten notes, dog-ears, and coffee stains. Others are only a summer fling, fizzling out after our first read. Some books are loved openly and lent promiscuously to all our friends. Others we strip of their dust jackets and guard with an unhealthy chastity so that none may share in their glory. Whatever your relationship, take a moment to reflect on the books that rest on a special shelf in your heart.

Do you believe in love at first sight? Today, bibliophiles, we take a look at ten BookThug books that stole our hearts from their very first line.

“In the district county of Enderbee, farther into the mountain corridors than the town of Byzantium and farther than media can go, on my thousand-acre elk ranch called Innisfree – that’s where you’ll find me, Jeffrey Inkster, with the elk I serve and the elk who serve me.”  —The Plotline Bomber of Innisfree by Josh Massey

“My father used to run around in the mid-forties with a group of hustling street toughs called the ‘Sous Gang.’”
—Grand Menteur by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

“I didn’t do a thing last night”
—No Work Finished Here: Rewriting Andy Warhol by Liz Worth

“She heaps”
—Leak by Kate Hargreaves

“At the Cirio in Brussels, I just woke up.”
—Universal Bureau of Copyrights by Bertrand Laverdure, translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

“One street over from Paul lives another Paul.”
—Pauls by Jess Taylor

“ants move along the bricks”
—Myrmurs: An Exploded Sestina by Shannon Maguire

“After the neighbour calls the authorities.”
—One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks