Most people know a good title when they hear it, but just what makes a title good is not obvious. I think you want a certain amount of strangeness (‘The Silmarillion’); it mustn’t be just common-or-garden prose. And you need resonance / mystery (‘The Maltese Falcon’; ‘The Silence Of The Lambs’). People should want to read the book to discover what the title means. I also think long / chatty titles (‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’; ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’) tend to work better for short stories than for novels. You said you were disqualifying quotation titles (e.g. ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’). But several of those you included are quotations too: ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ [John Donne] ‘The Magician’s Elephant’ [Surely a nod to ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ by C. S. Lewis?] ‘Gone With The Wind’ [Ernest Dowson] ‘This Side Of Paradise’ [Rupert Brooke] There might be others I don’t recognise. ‘As I Lay Dying’ is a sort-of quotation (Homer) but it’s filtered through translation which is a bit different I guess.
Thanks for pointing those out! I knew several of them were probably from literature, I just didn't take the time to look them all up. Again, I do think literature titles are great, they just aren't as inventive as original ones. I'm quite certain that The Magician's Elephant isn't a Lewis reference, if you read the book it's very much it's own thing. But I could be wrong. :)
That might be a good title for a mystery or a thriller; that's what it makes me think of. I'm not a huge thriller fan usually, so I don't love the sound of it, but that's just me. :)
@@RelishBooks thank you, yea its a thriller you can say. i guess it would go more to the youth-book section. its about two beings living on earth, humans and another one, and the other one is basically enslaved/seen as subhumane and thus treated as such, while the protagonists (one human and one that isn't) try to find some stability or peace.
You have C.S. Lewis on here already, but I would have to add Till We Have Faces. I would have read it anyway because it's Lewis, but I HAD to know what that title meant. I found it a tough read but worth it.
