Four for 'Fourteen

Woman reading on top of ladder

c. 1920

copyright: Bettmann/CORBIS

Yesterday's post was all about First Lines of the Past - blog posts from 2013. Today features First Lines of the Future - the opening sentence of the four books I am determined to read in 2014:

Roosevelt Is Coming Home, Hurrah! Exultant headlines in mid-June 1910 trumpeted the daily progress of the Kaiserin, the luxury liner returning the former president, Theodore Roosevelt, to American shores after his year's safari in Africa.
---The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013) by Doris Kearns Goodwin (750 pages)


He was tall, about fifty, with darkly handsome, almost sinister features; a neatly trimmed mustache, hair turning silver at the temples, and eyes so black they were like the tinted windows of a limousine--he could see out, but you couldn't see in.
---Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994) by John Berendt (388 pages)


In the spring of 1841, when John Tyler was President, a Kentucky farmer named Solomon Young, and his red-haired wife, Harriet Louisa Young, packed their belongings and with two small children started for the Far West.
---Truman (1992) by David McCullough (992 pages)


On a warm spring evening just before Easter 1927, people who lived in tall buildings in New York were given pause when the wooden scaffolding around the tower of the brand new Sherry-Netherton Apartment Hotel caught fire and it became evident that the city's firemen lacked any means to get water to such a height.
---One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson (456 pages)

All intriguing beginnings, I think. Do any of them pique your curiosity?