Two Classic Books Need to Be Revisited

From a book I first read in elementary school, its first sentence....

"The year 1866 was marked by a strange event, an unexplainable occurrence which is undoubtedly still fresh in everyone's memory."

Also from my schoolboy years, a book with a most provocative opening sentence....

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

Without Googling, try to identify the above classic books.

As any writing instructor will tell you, you must hook the reader from page one; even better if you can do it from sentence one.

Now, to honour my post's title, I must pick one and dig in; revisit.