"It was a dark and stormy night..."
It has indeed been a busy week for news in the world of belles lettres.
In an annual ritual closely watched throughout the English-speaking world, San Jose State University announced the results of its annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst sentence of 2010 — in the words of the contest, “to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” The award went to Molly Ringle of Seattle, Washington, for this doozy:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
The runners up, in our humble opinion, didn’t even come close. You can judge for yourself here.