Favorite book titles?

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Augusto Monterroso- Complete Works and Other Stories

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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

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Originally Posted by Adagio

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

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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 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.

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

"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."

I'd like to add two of my favorite books

Breakfast at Tiffany's
Far From the Madding Crowd

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.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

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.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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Ah, understood.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

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

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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?

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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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.

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

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

In Praise of Folly - Erasmus
Utopia - Moore