CHAMPIONSHIP TITLES: Yet more. I still have no Title Theory. You people have been no help at all! (Hee.)

Anyway. More titles I love:

AND BOTH WERE YOUNG

A BRIGHT ROOM CALLED DAY

About Last Night challenges me to narrow my selections to Five Best Ever. I’m going to use the same core criterion I used for the “43 favorite movies” list: stickiness. These are five titles I will never be able to get out of my head–titles that shape the way I view the world.

5 EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE

4 GONE WITH THE WIND

3 THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA

2 THE OCTOBER PEOPLE

1 A WINTER’S TALE

I desperately wanted to list THE SECRET HISTORY, but suspect that I am overly influenced by the actual book (the Tartt one–the Procopius is fine if you want Byzantine gossip, but, well, you know… with the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide…).

Now on to you lot. Asterisks mean I agree. Toni Wuersch writes: There was a book in Switzerland with a title for the ages:

Die Frau des Geliebten der Mutter

( The Wife of the Lover of the Mother )

It was the number one bestseller for more than a year in the late 80s.

The author was the wife of a scion of the Basel superrich, and had

three children by him. But he had a years long affair with her widowed

mother, which, when she found it out and tried to defend herself, led

him to separate and then divorce her, which caused her to lose her

Swiss citizenship for 30-35 years.

Lee Bockhorn contributes: A Good Man is Hard to Find (I’m pretty sure I didn’t see this anywhere on your page yet — surprising, considering all the other O’Connor suggestions. She came up with a lot of good ones!)

I know you’re not a big Fitzgerald fan, but a few of his short story titles come to mind:

Dice, Brass Knuckles, & Guitar (how’s that for intruiging?)

Babylon Revisited (in context)

The Diamond as Big as The Ritz

The Fire Next Time

* Invisible Man (in context)

* Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (I noticed you’ve been reading that lately…)

Music (thinking back to my music-school days…):

Quartet for the End of Time [Quatuor pour la fin du temps] – Messiaen. [Chamber music piece, written and first performed while Messiaen was in a German concentration camp during WWII.]

Enigma Variations [Elgar]

* Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? [jazz tune]

* Strange Fruit (in context) [sung by Billie Holiday]

From Cacciaguida the following: La Vita Nuova: a very daring title, given the theological claim it makes about the Beatrice experience

Roy Campbell had a lot great poem and poem-collection titles: The Flaming

Terrapin; Mithraic Emblems

Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday; The Napoleon of Notting Hill

How about operas?

Wagner, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) (adapted or spoofed by Nietzsche as * Götzendämmerung, Twilight of the Idols)

Korngold, * Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) (not about a plague, but about a man trying to overcome grief over his dead wife)

Rimsky-Korsakov, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kertezh

Mussorgsky, Khovanschina (Khovansky Stuff, or Khovanskying Around)

Mascagni, Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry)

Montemezzi, L’Amore dei Tre Re (The Love of Three Kings)

and of course

Strauss, * Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow)

From someone whose email still names him as “Bat-Mite“: Book titles:

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The General in His Labyrinth

Fahrenheit 451 (in context, me thinks)

Dog is my co-pilot

The man who was thursday

— Comics

Harlequin Valentine

The Wolves in the Walls

The Mystery Play

Kill your boyfriend

* Death: The time of your life.

* Death: The high cost of living.

Apocalipstick (Invisibles Vol.2)

Say you want a revolution (invisibles vol.1)

— And overtly ambitious names impossible to live up to. Nice tries,

though.

Automatic Kafka (comic)

Neon Genesis Evangelion (anime)

And from Christopher Arndt, after a very nice intro: every fiction that Tom Clancy has ever written. Each title in his Jack Ryan series is intriguing and sensical. More importantly they all sound suitably dramatic!

As it is, Shaara’s “The Killer Angels” also works.