Favorite book titles?

[mmmmmm]

I was just wondering about what everybody's favorite titles are. For me, an enticing title always persuades me to pick up a book, though some of the greatest novels ever have titles that aren't very exciting.

I believe my favorite title is "Never Let Me Go" by Ishiguro, but "In Search of Lost Time" and "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka" are close seconds.

[FalseReality]

tonto and the lone ranger fist fight in heaven

Armageddon in retrospect

[Takeahnase]

Aaah, I'm sure there are so many favourites that I just can't think of right now, but I quite like most of Haruki Murakami's titles. "Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World", for instance.

Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" is another one that just came to mind.

[Desolation]

I think that The Idiot is my favorite title ever.

[Paulclem]

The Once and Future King - TH White

[PortugalWillie]

As I Lay Dying except some crappy metal band used it as their band name. My friend said they haven't read it. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, they should really consider reading it.

[stlukesguild]

Augusto Monterroso- Complete Works and Other Stories
Italo Calvino- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...
Carlos Fuentes- Constancia: And Other Stories for Virgins
Robert Burton- Anatomy of Melancholia
Thomas De Quincey- Confessions of an English Opium Addict
Dave Eggers- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Francesco Colonna- Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Oscar Hijuelos- The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Machado de Assis- The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

[Not Worth It]

I'm a fan of 'Decline and Fall' and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

[mayneverhave]

The titles of Faulkner's major four novels, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Light in August are all nice euphonic titles.

Also good - As You Like It and Much Ado About Nothing, and Finnegans Wake for its thematic playfulness.

[King Mob]

I second "As I Lay Dying" being a wonderful title.

I've also always liked "Of Mice and Men", haven't read it though. And I love Barth's "Lost In The Funhouse"

[JuniperWoolf]

I like "Of Human Bondage," "The Bell Jar" (because hey, gross) and "Make Room! Make Room!" (that one especially)

[aeroport]

I second the Philip Dick - some others of his come to mind: Lies, Inc, The Man in the High Castle.

Also, Fish's Is There a Text in This Class?

[aeroport]

[EDIT
double-posted by accident]

[kasie]

How could I possibly resist a book called The Earth Hums in b Flat by Mari Strachan? It turned out to be a rather fey but charming tale of growing up in 1950s Wales. And Have the Men Had Enough? by Margeret Forster drew my attention - it struck an all too personal chord, being about how one elderly person's dementia has its affect on several generations of the family.

Recently If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino leapt off the shelves at me.

[Zee.]

east of eden
the turn of the screw
to kill a mockingbird
the sound and the fury
persuasion
in cold blood
house of leaves

[Adagio]

Augusto Monterroso- Complete Works and Other Stories
That title is not exciting at all. I guess you mean the individual titles within. :)

Some I like:

The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Les Miserables
Pale Fire
The Famished Road

[JuniperWoolf]

That title is not exciting at all. I guess you mean the individual titles within. :)


I didn't think it was that great at first either, but then I figured that it was because if its his complete works, than how could it be "AND other stories?"

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I like titles where it piques my curiosity, as in the title doesn't really reveal much about the story of the book until you actually read the story. I also like some titles for their sound. Some of mine are Slaughter-House 5, The Catcher in the Rye, The Sound and the Fury, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Heart of Darkness, As I Lay Dying (also makes for a great name for a metal band). Those are just the ones that come to my mind at the moment.

[mollie]

The Sound and the Fury
The House of Mirth
Of Human Bondage
Wuthering Heights

[Frankie Anne]

"He Fell in Love with his Wife" (E.P. Roe 1886 - bought it on eBay because of the title) and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."

[mmmmmm]

I'd like to add two of my favorite books

Breakfast at Tiffany's
Far From the Madding Crowd

[Virgil]

Light in August
The Rainbow
Sons and Lovers
The Sound and the Fury
The Great Gatsby
The Sun Also Riese
To The Lighthouse
Tender Is the Night
Blood Meridan


So many. I'll probably come back with more.

[JacobF]

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[stlukesguild]

I didn't think it was that great at first either, but then I figured that it was because if its his complete works, than how could it be "AND other stories?"

I was just struck by the irony of the title... which does not contain his "complete works" by the way.

[stlukesguild]

Its interesting to notice how many of these favorite titles are actually phrases taken from earlier sources:

Keats- Tender is the Night
Homer- As I Lay Dying
Shakespeare- The Sound and the Fury
John Donne- For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Bible- Absolom, Absolom
and even the Battle Hymn of the Republic from where The Grapes of Wrath was taken.

[Adagio]

I didn't think it was that great at first either, but then I figured that it was because if its his complete works, than how could it be "AND other stories?"

I was just struck by the irony of the title... which does not contain his "complete works" by the way.
Ah, understood.



Homer - As I Lay Dying
Shakespeare- The Sound and the Fury

That speech of Macbeth's is one of my favourite pieces of Shakespeare and the reason why Faulkner is now on my to-read list. I never realised As I lay Dying came from Homer - is it from The Odyssey?

[mona amon]

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love that title, but I haven't read it.

I also like Love in the Time of Cholera

One Hundred Years of Solitude

The Master and Margarita

The Name of the Rose

I haven't read the last two. Interesting about where some of the titles come from, stlukesguild.

[weltanschauung]

jose saramago's :
-ensaio sobre a cegueira (essay about blindness)
-intermitencias da morte (intermittences of death)
-objeto quase

j.l.borges'
-o jardim das veredas que se bifurcam (the garden of the bifurcating lanes)

thomas pinchon's gravity's rainbow

[Barbarous]

definitely Finnegans Wake and Pale Fire, as others have mentioned.

I also like
Les Fleurs Du Mal par Charles Baudelaire
Gravity's Rainbow by Pynchon
Blood Meridian by McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez
The Tin Drum by Grass
Speak, Memory by Nabokov

[Paulclem]

In Praise of Folly - Erasmus
Utopia - Moore

[MarkBastable]

A play, not a book but -


Mourning Becomes Electra

[MarkBastable]

Oh, and what I consider the most compellingly economic title for a novel...

Something Happened


....by Joseph Heller

Further than that, there's this lot.


The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Fifth Business
Catch-22
The Sirens of Titan
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Rendezvous with Rama
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Magic Christian
Jude the Obscure
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The Illustrated Man
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

Once you start thinking about it, you can't stop...

The Kraken Wakes
The Midwich Cuckoos
The Horse and his Boy
Love in a Time of Cholera
The Dancers at the End of Time
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy



I don't even like some of these books, and I'm not entirely sure why some of them seem to me to be great titles, but they have a resonance such that, if I were to see them in a bookstore, I'd pick them up, even though I already own them.

If I had to choose one though, even given my admiration of that Heller title at the top, I think I'd have to go with Donald Westlake's.....

Adios, Scheherezade

[togre]

The whole taking a line from a poem thing (or in this case a hymn) has endeared the titles of the 2nd and 3rd books of David Webber's Safehold series--By Schisms Rent Asunder and By Heresies Distressed.

The humorous short story writer, Patrick F. McManus titles his books after one of the stories in them and has published such gems as A Fine and Pleasant Misery, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, The Night The Bear Ate Gumba and Never Sniff A Gift Fish. Depending on your age and upbringed (you need to be an old codger from the sticks) the stories themselves are even more humorous than the titles.

[The Comedian]

The humorous short story writer, Patrick F. McManus titles his books after one of the stories in them and has published such gems as A Fine and Pleasant Misery, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?, The Night The Bear Ate Gumba and Never Sniff A Gift Fish. Depending on your age and upbringed (you need to be an old codger from the sticks) the stories themselves are even more humorous than the titles.

togre -- you bring back a flood of wonderful memories by bringing up McManus. I loved reading his stories when I was younger and I still return to them when I need a good, honest laugh.

Here's one of my favorite book titles: Abbey's Road, Take the Other, by Edward Abbey.

[kelby_lake]

A play, not a book but -


Mourning Becomes Electra

? A play is a book...

Anyhow, I like 'The Agony and The Ecstasy'

[aeroport]

Its interesting to notice how many of these favorite titles are actually phrases taken from earlier sources:

Keats- Tender is the Night
Homer- As I Lay Dying
Shakespeare- The Sound and the Fury
John Donne- For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Bible- Absolom, Absolom
and even the Battle Hymn of the Republic from where The Grapes of Wrath was taken.

Thomas Gray - Far From the Madding Crowd

[Alyoshka]

The already mentioned The Grapes of Wrath is for me the perfect title. It is poetic, beautiful, and somehow mysterious. Before I read the novel I found it amazing, but the story of the Joads gives the title an extraordinary power; no wonder Steinbeck was proud of his choice of title.

Two other great titles:

Fleich ist mein Gemüse (Meat is My Vegetable)
Snø vil falle over snø som har falt (Snow Will Fall on Fallen Snow)

Although the latter is a good title in translation, it cannot compare to the original, which is the translation's biggest problem - some words, phrases, and sentences have a quality which cannot be translated. What I try to say is: learn Norwegian ;)

[MarkBastable]

...................

[Emil Miller]

? A play is a book...

Anyhow, I like 'The Agony and The Ecstasy'

This calls to mind the one critic's summation of the film i.e. "All agony and no extasy." Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit but it certainly nailed that particular example of Hollywood's artistic licence.

[Red-Headed]

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ Ray Bradbury

Originally from act 4 of Macbeth "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."

I've always admired anyone who can write well in trochaic pentameter!

[MarkBastable]

? A play is a book...





Even as I qualified my choice of Mourning Becomes Electra by saying, "...it's a play, not a book...", I thought, "Well, the actual physical object is a book, and I expect that'll be pointed out." On the other hand, I knew that if I didn't make that qualification, it would be suggested that the word 'book' in this context meant a text intended to be experienced direct from the page - so a novel, non-fiction work, or even poetry - but not a play, screenplay. or the collected shooting scripts of the original series of Lost.

I figured out within ten minutes of subscribing to this forum that it doesn't matter what you say, someone'll say otherwise. And as a practising contrarian, I don't mind that at all.

[kelby_lake]

It's published and read when it is studied by English classes. It's read by the actors and director and anyone involved with the show. And O'Neill's plays pretty mcuh have to be read as they are so unstageable.

I hate the idea of belittling plays just because the eventual product will be a show and it's not in continuous prose. Poetry's pointless reading unless you read it out loud and in its original language (although one might make a claim for the epic stuff).

[Red-Headed]

Even as I qualified my choice of Mourning Becomes Electra by saying, "...it's a play, not a book...",

Actually, I nearly suggested it myself. It is a great title. I reckon you can get away with it. After all, many plays were written & were never expected to actually be 'played' or acted out. This practise can even be traced back to the Romans & Greeks (they had to make their own entertainment in those days as You Tube hadn't been invented).

An example of this in English literature would be Milton's Samson Agonistes.

[promtbr]

All my favorites have been mentioned repeatedly.

I did get a kick out of two Dalkey Archive Titles:

In Candyland it's Cool to Feed on Your Friends-- James Chapman

Were We Were Going and What We Were Doing-- Damian Searls

Now if we are talking YA books, all bets are off, since I think quirky'catchy funny titles are almost pre-requisite of publishing these days.


----

[bluosean]

I also think that Faulkner is great with titles but most of the authors that I like come up with great titles. I like some Melville titles especially of his shorter work.

The Enchated Isles. The Bell Tower. Benito Cereno. The Pizza Tales (the name of all of the stories together). The Pizza.

[saint9]

Hmmm.... I enjoy the novels the Taiko and really my favorite title would be Crossroads of Destiny

[chacha50]

If on a Winters Night a Traveller is such a fantastic book...just read it a couple of months ago and was amazed.

[ktm5124]

Hm, two nice titles that come to mind are F. Scott's The Beautiful and Damned (I love the omission of "the" in that title -- gives it a whole new meaning) and Poe's short story Fall of the House of Usher (particularly because of the pun).

It's interesting that titles got longer and more descriptive over time. Back when literature was more formal the title would often just signify the form -- for instance, "Sonnet #44" or "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Also true for poetry, as opposed to novels.

[Red-Headed]

The Dark Light Years ~ Brian W. Aldiss. Mainly for its use of an oxymoron.

[Mark F.]

Bukowski has some brilliant titles ; Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire...


Ask the Dust - John Fante
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

[My name is red]

The title but definetely not the book for this one:The unbearable lightness of being

Hello sadness
Good morning,midnight

[Paulclem]

Hi My Name is Red - I read My Name is Red recently. Superb book. It's one that I'll keep and go back to again. Fascinating history, plot and narrative structure.

I liked Snow by him too. Another one I will be reading again.

[sixsmith]

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Lay of the Land - Richard Ford
The Outsider - Camus

[My name is red]

Hi My Name is Red - I read My Name is Red recently. Superb book. It's one that I'll keep and go back to again. Fascinating history, plot and narrative structure.

I liked Snow by him too. Another one I will be reading again.
Hello paulclem,if you enjoy the books with stream of consciousness technique in which Pamuk is an expert for me,i'd recommend you 'The silent house' (if that's the english title) which is my favourite of all time.
I'm glad you've enjoyed them,it's hard job to find good books.

plus;thank you for reminding
we really needed to utter its name under this thread.My Name is Red is the perfect example of a good,appealing title.
All best...

[Paulclem]

Hello paulclem,if you enjoy the books with stream of consciousness technique in which Pamuk is an expert for me,i'd recommend you 'The silent house' (if that's the english title) which is my favourite of all time.
I'm glad you've enjoyed them,it's hard job to find good books.

plus;thank you for reminding
we really needed to utter its name under this thread.My Name is Red is the perfect example of a good,appealing title.
All best...

Thanks - I'll look out for it.