How to have fun in a bookstore

My friend M claims he can determine if a book is good or bad by reading the first line. M's a poet and a line is as important to him as a sentence is to a novelist or to a prose stylist who writes nonfiction. We've spent hours together in bookstores, pulling books randomly from bookshelves, never choosing a book by an author of reputation but by an author unknown to us, opening the chosen book and reading the first line, knowing instantly from the first reading of the first line whether the book is good or not and going on from there, never buying the good book but making a note of it for future reference.

Reading this way, a bad book is much more fun to read than a good book. A bad book can make you feel very good about yourself– that you know good from bad and that you'd never write a bad book yourself – while a good book most often challenges your most cherished assumptions. Besides, good books take time; the better the book is written the more time it takes to read, and time doesn't grow on trees.

It's true that first lines don't lie: anyone who can name a good book with a bad first line, or a bad book with a good first line, please come forward!