Favourite titles...

...of books and plays. You don't even have to have read them.

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.


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
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Magic Christian
Jude the Obscure
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

But the best title for a novel - a title so good, it could be used for any novel - is Joseph Heller's Something Happened.

And yet it's not quite the very best - because the best title of anything, ever, anywhere, in any form or genre, forever and ever, turn round touch the ground and no returns, is:

Mourning Becomes Electra




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I like this thread; nice counter to the one about bad titles... :) I agree with Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, Jude the Obscure and Morning Becomes Electra

Here are some of my favorites:

Tender is the Night Fitzgerald
Kafka by the Shore Murakami
and Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

An Artist of the Floating World Ishiguro
East of Eden Steinbeck
The Winter of our Discontent
Catcher in the Rye
For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ok I am sure there are many more, but these are just off the top of my head...

A Clockwork Orange.
Slaughter-House Five
Heart of Darkness
Childhood's End
Blood Meridian
Paradise Lost
The Things They Carried
Things Fall Apart
"The Second Coming"
Gravity's Rainbow
The Crying of Lot 49
Dracula
To the Lighthouse
Book of the New Sun
The Scarlet Letter
Book of the New Sun
Note from the Underground
The Left Hand of Darkness
East of Eden
Midnight's Children
Ulysses
The Odyssey
The Sirens of Titan
The Sound and the Fury
Absalom, Absalom!
As I Lay Dying
Catcher in the Rye
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Invisible Cities
Dream of the Red Chamber
Babylon Revisited
Faust

The Anatomy of Melancholia
The Sun Also Rises
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Sound and the Fury

Tennessee Williams has a slew of great titles:

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
A Streetcar Named Desire
The Glass Menagerie
Summer and Smoke
The Night of the Iguana
Suddenly, Last Summer
The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

Every last on of these titles was enough to make me curious enough to want to at least give these books (plays) a perusal.

A Midsummer Night's Dream
Orlando Innamorato
Les Fleurs du Mal
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Sense and Sensibility
Something Wicked this Way Comes
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Like Water for Chocolate
Explosion in the Cathedral
Labyrinths
Dream Tigers
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Spanking the Maid
In Praise of the Stepmother

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi

A Clockwork Orange.

Gravity's Rainbow

The Sound and the Fury

One Hundred Years of Solitude

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I agree with these too!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

The Anatomy of Melancholia

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

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I cannot believe I forgot this one! one of my favorite titles actually... Kundera has a lot of good ones: Life is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Yay! A happy forum!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Something Wicked this Way Comes
I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream
A Wrinkle in Time
The Sound and the Fury
Brave New World

Some I can think of at the moment:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Love in the Time of Cholera

Life According to Garp


But my all time favorite is probably this one:


And to My Nephew Albert I Leave the Island That I Won Off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game
by David Forrest

It is a book translated version of which I read with my family during a terrible snow-storm as a teenager... The family lost that copy, unfortunately, and I am desperately trying to get a hold of one - because of the memories it evokes more than anythign else. A copy in English costs around £90 today.

The Book of Disquiet
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Midsummer Nights Dream
Alice In Wonderland
The Rediscovery Of Man
Flowers Of Evil
Dreamtigers
Master and Margarita
A Clockwork Orange
Bend Sinister

The Savage Detectives
Brave New World
Love in the Time of Cholera
In Cold Blood
Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness in the West
American Psycho
Lolita

These are my favourite titles.

Catch-22
To Kill Mocking Bird
Far From the Madding Crowd
East of Eden
Of Mice and Men
Grapes of Wrath
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Three Musketeers
Gone With the Wind
Bel Ami
Great Expectation
Prisoner of Zenda
La Miserables
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

So many to choose from. Here's a few favourites of mine:
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Trout Fishing in America
Willard and His Bowling Trophies
Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Sombrero Fallout
In Watermelon Sugar
(ok at this point I should just say all the works of Richard Brautigan)
The Revenge of the Lawn (there I go again)
Rape a Love Story
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Number9Dream
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
A Wild Sheep Chase
The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts

Journey to the End of the Night
The Sound and the Fury
The Idiot
Tender is the Night
In Search of Lost Time
Much Ado About Nothing
Life: A User's Manual
To the Lighthouse
Pale Fire
Gravity's Rainbow
How It Is
Twilight of the Idols

I can't add much, except that I agree with a lot of the ones already mentioned! Hmm, what about:

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
The Legend of Good Women by Chaucer
Three Men in A Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome
The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul by Douglas Adams
The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Guber
Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ by Rik Mayall (which I would never read, but the title is rather good...)

Sorry for repeats:

Tempest-Tost - Davies
Unbearable Lightness of Being - Kundera
Light in August - Faulkner
Island of the Day Before - Eco
Name of the Rose - Eco
Tender is the Night - Fitzgerald
if on a winter's night a traveller - Calvino
Dionysiaca - Nonnos (it's jsut fun to say)
The wine-dark sea - Sciascia

Once you start thinking about this, you can't stop. (And by 'you' of course I mean 'I'.)

The Kraken Wakes
The Midwich Cuckoos
The Horse and his Boy
The Hunger Games
Under Milk Wood
The Breakfast of Champions
Behold the Man
The Dancers at the End of Time
The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy
Adios, Scheherezade

(That last one is a novel by Donald Westlake, rather than a valediction for a moderator.)

The Sot-Weed Factor

Trout Bum
Even Brook Trout Get the Blues
Sex, Death, and Fly-Fishing
Standing in a River Waving a Stick
Dances with Trout
Another Lousy Day in Paradise
Death Taxes And Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly Fishing Treasury
A River Runs Through It

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Atlas Shrugged
The Flowers of Evil
Run Silent, Run Deep

How To Avoid Huge Ships
The Lull Before Dorking
Teach Your Wife to be a Widow
The Radiation Recipe Book
How to Make Your Own Shoes
The International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying
My Visit to Venus

Quote:

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Originally Posted by AlysonofBathe

I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream

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If you liked that one, you'll love his follow up "I Have no Butt and I Must Poop!"

Quote:

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Originally Posted by hawthorns

Trout Bum
Even Brook Trout Get the Blues
Sex, Death, and Fly-Fishing
Standing in a River Waving a Stick
Dances with Trout
Another Lousy Day in Paradise
Death Taxes And Leaky Waders: A John Gierach Fly Fishing Treasury
A River Runs Through It

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Atlas Shrugged
The Flowers of Evil
Run Silent, Run Deep

How To Avoid Huge Ships
The Lull Before Dorking
Teach Your Wife to be a Widow
The Radiation Recipe Book
How to Make Your Own Shoes
The International Spy Museum Handbook of Practical Spying
My Visit to Venus

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Haha, these are great. So many fishing titles.

The only ones that I really like which haven't been mentioned yet are Flowers in the Attic, Steal This Book! and The Moon and Sixpence.

Something Wicked This Way Comes
A Streetcar Named Desire
Gone With The Wind
The Collector
The Bell Jar
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Kite-Runner
Mid-night Children
Pride and Prejudice
For Whom The Bells Toll
A Farewell To Arms

Buddhisnm has thrown up some evocative titles:

The Way of the White Clouds

A Dance of 17 Lives

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

I had to dredge the memory for the next one. I didn't get far with it at the time.

Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S. by Jeremy Leven

Pretty much all of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels have great titles.