Bastet's Lair

News, book reviews, essays, interviews, fiction writing, politics, and my view of the world

May 11, 2007

Book Titles That Never Should Have Been

Today's blog is at total rip-off, but I will give credit where it is due: Writers Write, a weekly e-newsletter.

The topic was strangest book titles and Writers Write listed the winners:

The Bookseller magazine has announced the winner of the Oddest
Book Title Award. The winner of the Bookseller/Diagram Prize
was The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide
to Field Identification (Harry N. Abrams). The book was
written by artist Julian Montague. Julian beat out How Green
Were the Nazis? a study of the environmental policies of the
Third Reich, in a surprise result.

Stray Shopping Carts received a third of the more
than 5,500 votes cast by members of the public on the website of
trade magazine The Bookseller. 'It's a sort of strange honour to
have, Montague said. 'But I welcome the publicity and it's nice
that people are finding out my book exists.'

*****

Runner-up for the prize was Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon
Boxes of Daghestan, by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov,
Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie (Bennett & Bloom).

The other finalists were Di Mascio's Delicious Ice Cream: Di Mascio
of Coventry: an Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting
and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans, by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis
Pitcher and Alan Wilkinson (Past Masters); Proceedings of the
Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium (Kluwer); and Better
Never To Have Been: the Harm of Coming Into Existence, by David
Benatar (Clarendon Press).

What would you have voted for? I really liked the winner myself. The Nazi title was just too much. And Better Never to Have Been has that Zen-like flavor to it.

Lynn