Welcome back to Hardcore Literature, your favourite book club.

Deep dives into the greatest books ever written.

Provocative poems, evocative epics, and life-changing literary analyses.

We don't just read the great books. We live them.

Together we'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more.

We'll relish the most moving art ever committed

to the page and stage from every age. Join us and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy, on the reading

adventure of a lifetime with hardcore literature. We like to say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, don't we?

But I feel the same way about first lines in literature, openings to books.

The first line of a novel is the window to the soul of that work.

And whilst we likely cannot memorize entire novels word by word,

we can commit first lines and indeed last lines too. We can commit them to memory and so much

can be scaffolded on to those first and last lines.

So much meaning hangs off of them.

Great writers will spend inordinate amounts of time

on those first lines because they are our entrance

to that fictional world.

A really great line can often be a key to unlocking the entire book,

but what makes a great line? Well, we can break our criticism down into two really broad steps.

The first thing is to note what you like, what you're drawn to, what peaks your curiosity, what intrigues you.

And then the second step is all about making the implicit, explicit, trying to drudge up the reasons,

trying to discover why you were pulled in a certain direction.

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