Blood and Guts It's a short history of medicine and I'm not sure why I picked it up all those years ago but I actually found it a very interesting read!
Personally I really love the Edge Chronicles series! All of the books in that series I find fascinating; however if I had to pick one, I believe the second would be my absolute favorite. They are very high level fantasy though, so you might need the taste for that genre before really getting into them.
All well and good! But this thread is for the actual titles of the books, not the books themselves. Are there any titles you particularly like?
Title that didn't do the book justice: Eight Thousand Ways to Die by Lawrence Block. Great detective book with great character development and yet the title - it's like, you see it and you almost wanna not read it, ever. To Kill a Mockingbird is an intriguing title - can't say I love it but it does intrigue me. Fault in Our Stars is an exceptionally beautiful one too.
A short story, but also the title of an anthology: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - Harlan Ellison Also, the titles (and subtitles) of any of Mary Roach's (excellent) books: Gulp - Adventures On The Alimentary Canal Stiff - The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers Bonk - The Curious Coupling Of Science And Sex
If we're talking non-fiction, I've always like the title of J.E. Gordon's popular book on structural engineering: Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down.
Well, i think Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is a pretty decent one, sets up the tone pretty well. Even though the guide isn't ever used much
I was learning for an exam "British literature" today and came across William Blake. I like his collections titles: -Songs of Innocence (and Experience) -An Island in the Moon -The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Question: Would Codex Regus be technically classed as the title if it is the name the book is known by?
So simple and so haunting. Silent Spring has a similar quality. It is probably my favorite book title ever. Like Paradise Lost, it is a relatively simple noun and a simple adjective; together, those two words evoke so many gloomy mental images. Silent Spring has one of the best cadences of any titles I have ever heard (it rolls off the tongue so easily and it sounds so forceful and yet delicate). It gets bonus points for being an alliteration. My favorite titles tend to be short, with simple nouns, proper nouns, and invented terms. They tend to avoid articles, infinitives, gerunds, and other constructions that increase cognitive load. Here is a very short list of some of my favorite titles: Brave New World Catch-22 Atlas Shrugged Fight Club Slaughterhouse Five Animal Farm Dune Gone with the Wind Ender's Game The safe choice for a title is typically just a single proper noun, like Hamlet, Ulysses, Lolita, etc. Names exist purely to identify, so using a name specific to the content of the book in order to identify the book will always result in a unique name that is exactly as memorable as the book's content itself. For fan fiction, I came up with some titles I am particularly proud of: Sweettooth (the story is about a drug called sweettooth, because it was invented as an artificial sweetener) Quadrophilia (or Tetraphilia, not sure which one I like better. I like that Quadrophilia sounds so similar to Quadrophenia, which is one of my favorite albums and the one I was listening to when I thought of the plot premise. But Tetraphilia makes more sense since "tetra" and "philia" are both from Greek, whereas "quadro" is from Latin. The story is about a creature that steals love, and it uses this premise to examine four different kinds of love.) Equa Sacra (a reference to the concept of homo sacer) Fan fiction authors can come up with some incredible titles (my favorites are bold): Cheerilee's Garden Past Sins Xenophilia Background Pony Hands Petriculture Princess Celestia Hates Tea Memory Pending The Moony Maiden Estrus Sparkle's Law Pinkie Pie Learns a New Word Forever Faithful Hiatus The Games We Play Composure U-Harmony Everypony Dies Derplicity Pinkie Watches Paint Dry White Box A Non-Copyrighted Adventure Skittles For non-fan fiction, here are of my favorites from the list on Goodreads: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I Was Told There'd Be Cake (eerily prophetic of "the cake is a lie" meme spawned by Portal, one of my favorite games) John Dies at the End Go the Fuck to Sleep Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas No Country for Old Men I Gave You My Heart, but You Sold It Online Practical Demonkeeping Even God Is Single Requiem for a Dream Green Eggs and Ham Crime and Punishment Never Let Me Go Lord of the Flies Moby-Dick Rape: A Love Story A Farewell to Arms Twelve Angry Men Vanity Fair I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings The Fault in Our Stars Catapult Soul Ask the Dust Houdini Heart Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet Jacob Have I Loved Pissing in the Gene Pool Foreskin's Lament God Created the Integers And the grand finale: Noisy outlaws, unfriendly blobs, and some other things that aren't as scary, maybe, depending on how you feel about lost lands, stray cellphones, creatures from the sky, parents who disappear in Peru, a man named Lars Farf, and one other story we couldn't quite finish, so maybe you could help us out Movies and TV series: Breaking Bad Arrested Development Firefly Memento Sherlock 24 Pulp Fiction Inception Forrest Gump Back to the Future Jurassic Park Goodfellas City of God Full Metal Jacket Reservoir Dogs Casablanca Slumdog Millionaire Citizen Kane Secondhand Lions Avatar Mean Girls Groundhog Day Independence Day Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Ratatouille TRON Ferris Bueller's Day Off Shutter Island Total Recall
Wow, I went overboard. There are two that I really want to highlight: Forever Faithful Possibly even more euphonic than Silent Spring. It is likewise an alliteration, and in fact it has three fs, a v (which are just voiced and unvoiced versions of each other), a th, and an l -- all of which are some of the most pleasant-sounding and most comfortable-to-pronounce consonants in the English phonemic inventory. And r is more of a half-vowel half-consonant. Furthermore, the title has no stops -- the whole thing is spoken in one breath. It comes out like a whisper. Seriously, whisper it to yourself. Notice how it sounds. Notice how quietly you can whisper it and still hear it clearly. Imagine that it is a character's motto, and that this character whispers it to a loved one or a brother-in-arms in their last breath. While I usually do not like titles that try to be mysterious or poetic, this one works. Rape: A Love Story The single most provocative title I have ever heard of. Sure, there are vulgar titles like Dude, You're a Fag, but none of them evoke the subtle cognitive dissonance of Rape: A Love Story. It has a twisted sense of humor, but at the same time, I imagine that the book maturely deals with themes of love, repentance, and forgiveness, from the perspective of someone who was raped. (All this just from the title.) As soon as I read that title, I desperately wanted to know the premise of the book. My work in progress is about a character who cannot be remembered (no one can form long-term memories of her, so while she can converse with people for a short time, she is a perpetual stranger). She is also a musician, and her curse is related to ancient music. Working title: Unsung Not sure if I love it just yet. There are several qualities I like: it is a single word, it is fairly easy to say, it is phonetically extremely simple (only one vowel, two similar consonants, and another consonant), and my mind wants to complete the phrase "unsung hero". It also evokes exactly the atmosphere that the book is supposed to develop. I just wonder if the title is too short or undistinctive. I want the title to be memorable, and I want people to remember the book immediately and effortlessly when they hear the title. Then again, maybe this title has the benefit that when people hear the word "unsung" in any context, they will think of the book. The more I think about titles, the more I realize the importance of a category of titles that I did not even mention: the "book names". These titles are not common words, and they are not even names of entities mentioned in the book: they are literally words with no purpose other than to identify the book. Some of these names have become so ubiquitous that we do not even italicize them, and we put the word "the" before them. We often do not even capitalize them. The bible, the aeneid, the odyssey, the illiad, etc. To me, that kind of timeless ubiquity is the ultimate measure of the success of a title. Those titles are not designed to get people to read the book or to represent the theme of the book; in fact, they are not really designed with any deliberate effort, but they still label a mental space in our minds reserved solely for the books that they identify.
Bridge to Terabithia The Dance of the Dissident Daughter - (didn't care for the book but admired the title.) A Clockwork Orange Wow. Removing titles from their content is difficult. I was about to type The Blue Castle onto my list, but then I realized that's not really an amazing title. I just like the book.
Here's one I forgot to mention earlier: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
Three from Jimmy Breslin: I Want to Thank My Brain For Remembering Me. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight Can't Anyone Here Play This Game? This last is a quote that has always been attributed to the legendary Casey Stengel in the first season of the New York Mets. But in his memoir (the first title listed), Breslin admits that Stengel never said it; Breslin just made it up for an article he was doing on the Mets after spending an evening getting hammered with Stengel. Another illusion gone!
I know another aspiring writer who calls his epic fantasy series The Unsung. Not that it probably matters, but thought I'd mention it. As for the topic, my favorite title is probably The Unknown Soldier (1954) by Väinö Linna. The novel documents a real war, although it's a work of fiction, and there's something visceral and ironic about the title in the context of the novel and its intensely memorable characters. To many these soldiers -- who suffered because the Brass got the brilliant idea that yeaaaah the malnourished, piss-poor people armed with second-hand weapons and dressed in third-hand garb sure are gonna take back what's theirs from the fucking Soviet Union the biggest nation in the world -- are unknown in real life, but also, in a way, the novel has given the real people names, faces, and voices, so actually they're not so unknown anymore. ETA: Since nobody here knows this author, the closest equivalent for Americans would be James Jones, I think. Who also has cool titles for his novels, actually, like Some Came Running, The Thin Red Line, and The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories.
