Great Novels of 2016

I have one friend who reads the very last sentence of a book to determine if it's worth reading, and one friend who reads the first sentence to determine the very same thing. Both apply this method exclusively to works of fiction--both exempt works of non-fiction--and both claim that their method is unerring.

I've never been able to get these two friends in the same room at the same time, though it's a goal of mine to do so sometime in the new year, 2017.

Each method seems reasonable, as one of them relies on a beginning and one on an end, both of which are necessary in the writing and reading of any novel. I've tested both methods in laboratory conditions, in bookstores as a consumer, and in the privacy of my own library. 

Having recently completed a major survey of novels in my personal possession, for the purpose of condensing my collection for considerations of storage space, I can report that both methods have their virtues, giving each the sternest test by reading the first sentence of oone of my favorite novel's, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne--

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possible the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortune of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost.--

--and the last sentence--

Lord! said my mother, what is all this story about?--A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick--And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

Well, I thought, both methods, reading the beginning and end of a novel, yield fruit. And so I used both, eliminating a number of novels from my library in the process.