Two other great examples:
William Gibson's Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "Call me Ishmael."
Neither strictly tells the reader what the books are about, but they're great hooks.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
What a different setting it evokes.
Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Who's there?"
Kafka's Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."
That is one of my favorite openers, too, but it has seemed weirdly anachronistic for a while. Does anyone under the age of 30 remember television static? Will anyone in Gibson's future?
I do. In fact I've seen it in the past 24 hours. I want to at some point hook up a microcontroller to an old TV with a coax cable and subtly manipulate the static until a shadow person emerges from the spotty mist. I figure it would make a cool demo. [0]
>Will anyone in Gibson's future?
Probably not.
Which is kind a funny, considering nobody will understand that. :)
Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five "All of this happened, more or less."
[edit: originally I put Catch-22, which the user below correctly points out was not Vonnegut and had a different opening line]
Kurt Vonnegut's writing is superior to my mind, but a lot of people may disagree.