Titles
What are some book titles that you absolutely love? Not the books themselves. (You are even allowed to hate the book itself).
Here are a few to which I always return. I have not necessarily read them all yet.
- Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis
- Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger
- A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
- The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
- The Fault in Our Stars, John Greene
- The Electric Church, Avery Cates
- This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer
- Something Wicked this Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
- As I Lay Dying, Faulkner
I love love LOVE their titles. I honestly don't know why. I can't help but think that there has to be a formula behind what makes them sound so lyrical to me.
Something about their cadence and their structure, yes, but also the ambiguity. I feel like each of these has a ghost-like open-endedness that makes me think of something BIGGER. Each of these has a grandiosity, too. You can almost smell that it's about more than a story.
Perhaps I adore these because they provoke a question. For example,
1. Till We Have Faces - When will we have faces? How did we lose them? What do you mean by "face"? And why "we"? Why not just you? Or him? Or her?
2. Her Fearful Symmetry - Who is she? Can a person have symmetry? What part of her is symmetrical? Why is it fearful? Is it fearful in a beautiful way?
Titles can speak to us. They can be matter-of-fact or vague. Beautiful or ugly. I will eagerly scoop up a title that speaks to me of its soul and its scope.
This is not just mindless entertainment, the title seems to say, this is important.
This is singular. This has a message.
Pay attention.
Now, if you please, share with me a few titles you go back to and why you think they speak to you.
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