My favourite hook sentence is this:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

(Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)

It immediately catches your undivided attention and keeps it so right to the end of the book.
Take care and do keep so well.

That book is one big collection of really good (and funny!) sentences. You should read it.

I LOVE the excerpt from the Boy Scout Handbook — “A Scout! What fun he finds in hiking into the woods! He tells North from South by the stars, or East from West by the shadows.”

it’s so promising!

Hello Silentseas — You’re right, there’s a lot of pressing going on in that first bit from Lolita, which is so appropriate for Humbert! You get the feeling Nabokov loved writing this. I think a writer’s joy in words and in his story really draws a reader in.

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tounge taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Besides the playful alliteration, Nabokov (and Humbert Humbert) press the name into the readers mind, the adoration, the fixation, everything that HH covets about her. Flat out stunning and a definite hook.

But to the point, I did check for hooks in some of the most important books in my life, necessarily non-fiction.

First–The Handbook for Boys, copyright 1945 by Boy Scouts of America, noting in its own introduction, “since first published in 1910 (the Handbook for Boys) has been the Country’s best seller, with the exception of the Bible.” This in itself has considerable hookyness, but nothing in comparison to the beginning of its first instructional chapter.
Chapter 1, What Is A Boy Scout?
“A Scout! What fun he finds in hiking into the woods! He tells North from South by the stars, or East from West by the shadows.”
Could there be a better hook for a self-improvement book? I don’t know whether it was the stars or the shadows, but something hooked me into going onward to Eagle Scout and 36 merit badges. Or it could have been the hook my mother attached to my collar and led me kicking and screaming.
Second, and these are in descending order,– from my freshman math book, Analytic Geometry and Calculus, by Longley, Smith and Wilson (all Yale professors), in Chapter I, Cartesian Coordinates. The Straight Line.
1. Introduction.
“A survey of the problems which can be solved by elementary mathematics (algebra, geometry, and trigonometry) shows that although they are large in number they form a rather restricted class.”

This is a somewhat more subdued hook than appeared in the Boy Scout Handbook, but I did finish the book in one year and got the grades I needed to advance to the hooks in Differential Equations and Theory of Calculus. (Sadly, I can’t find the links to those right now.)

Third, and actually difficult to rate lower in compellingness with the previous hook in my math book, Elements of Physics, by Smith and Cooper (Ohio State University professors), copyright 1957–

Chapter 1. Physics and Measurement
1.1 “What is Physics? In its broadest sense physics is that branch of knowledge which describes and explains the material world and its phenomena.”
If this doesn’t seem to be hook enough, one is definitely compelled by the second sentence, “In terms of this sweeping definition, all the other physical sciences may be regarded as branches of the basic science–physics, which a century ago was known as natural philosophy.”

Fortunately, I was swept, after only five pages, to the method for converting 60 miles per hour to 88 feet per second, and in the blink of five years to relativity and quantum mechanics.

Thanks again for resteering my attention to this most important tactic in writing–a compelling beginning,
Smokey

Of course, there’s “‘Twas a dark and stormy night…” (Isn’t there a competition and a book on that somewhere for the worst opening sentences?)

“Hunted?
By wild animals?

In broad daylight on the Santa Monica Freeway? Mad! Mad!”