Thursday, October 22, 2009

Book Titles Weird and Monotonous

Another link courtesy of American Libraries Direct: the Weird Books Room on AbeBooks!

Some of my favorites from this selection:
Why Do I Vomit?
Soldier Bear
(you have to see the cover)
What to Do When the Russians Come: A Survivor's Guide
Oedipus in Disneyland
Is Your Dog Gay?
Poop-Eaters: Dung Beetles in the Food Chain
Nuclear War: What's in It for You?
How to Survive a Robot Uprising
The Bible Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome

Lately I've also noticed an increasingly annoying phenomenon in trendy scholarly book titles. We're an academic library, so of course we buy a lot of academic books, and it's become obvious to me that the format Trendy Title: A Trendy Subtitle That Explains What the Trendy Title is Actually About is very popular. I would vote for an even more original trendy title that can fit in one line and can also adequately represent what the book is about. Here are some examples of what I mean from the recent batch of books that we ordered:

Guesstimation: Solving the World's Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin
World Without End?: Environmental Disaster and the Collapse of Empires
The Sea Woman: Sedna in Inuit Shamanism and Art in the Eastern Arctic
The Borders Within: Encounters Between Mexico and the U.S.
Al'America: Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots

There are SO many of these that whenever I see one I just want to shake the author, or the publisher, or whoever is responsible for it and say "We get it already! The trendy title is very clever! Can you just tell us what the book is about instead?"

I guess I'm stuck with book titles in this line of work, from the amusing to the downright obnoxious.

2 comments:

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