Favorite titles are streaming in from readers, in some cases with annotation:
No, But I Saw the Movie
Dewey Defeats Truman
Memories of the Ford Administration
Some Tame Gazelle
Hot Water
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (attention-getting, of course, but also good because sadness and outrage and helplessness seem built right into the title…)
The Artificial Nigger (bracing, can’t not read it after that)
Bend Sinister (a mysteriously evocative title, with good Nabokovian euphony)
All’s Well That Ends Well
The Scarlet Letter
Dude, Where’s My Country?
Mystery Train (so good, it’s been a song and book and movie title)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Operation Shylock
A Kiss to Build a Dream On
And, my new favorite: Let the Dog Drive. Just one question: is the emphasis on “Dog” or “Drive”?
Meanwhile, the originator of the question, Eve Tushnet, has risen to my challenge and named her top five titles:
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 TALEAs someone who has always been terrible with titles, I feel it’s only fair to give terrible titles a nod here, too. They’re rarer than you might suppose. The vast majority of book titles are just lukewarm water, serviceable and forgettable. To attain true offensiveness, they almost have to get cute on you, as with my sole (for now) nominee, the true book Castration: An Abbreviated History of Manhood, by Gary Taylor. If I were him, I’d blame the publisher.