A Book of Book Lists is back!
Out now in new paperback edition just in time for Christmas
A new edition of my 2017 A Book of Book Lists has, as the young people are wont to exclaim, just dropped. Originally in fabulous flexibound format which “combines the concept and elegance of a hardcover book with the softness and flexibility of the paperback”, it is now available in perfect paperback, making it even easier to enjoy such delights as Bin Laden’s Bookshelf (the original working title for the book), Napoleon’s travelling library, and Murph’s Interstellar bookcase.
To celebrate this, here are a couple of very writerly entries from it to give those few of you who have not yet read it a flavour of what could be ahead of you on Christmas Day if you’ve been good all year. First of all, a look at Books That Have Never Been Written, followed by the slightly less ‘does what it says on the tin’, Not The Great Gatsby.
Books that have never been written
The Man with the Shredded Ear
All Guns Are Loaded
Choice of Dessert
Return from Ruin
Here It Is Saturday
My Best to the Bride
The Man Who Loved the Rain
The Corpse Came in Person
Law Is Where You Buy It
The Porter Rose at Dawn
We All Liked Al
Fair With Some Rain
They Only Murdered Him Once
Too Late for Smiling
The Diary of a Loud Check Suit
Deceased When Last Seen
Quick, Hide the Body
A Night in the Ice Box
Goodnight and Goodbye
The Cool-Off
Uncle Watson Wants to Think
The Parson in the Parlor
Stop Screaming—It’s Me
No Third Act
Twenty Minutes’ Sleep
They Still Come Honest
Between Two Liars
The Lady with the Truck
The Black-Eyed Blonde
Rigadoo
Thunder Bug
Everyone Says Good-bye Too Soon
In 1985, shortly before he died, Italo Calvino told his wife Esther that he intended to write at least a dozen more books. While some of his work was gathered posthumously in The Road to San Giovanni, there are some which exist only in title form including ‘Instructions for the Other Self’, ‘Cuba’ and ‘The Objects’.
Other writers have far lengthier lists in their notebooks of good ideas for titles that never got written. The list at the top is Raymond Chandler’s. He also invented a writer, Aaron Klopstein. Before killing himself with an Amazonian blow gun, Klopstein ‘wrote’ two novels called Once More the Cicatrice and The Seagull Has No Friends, two volumes of poetry (The Hydraulic Facelift and Cat Hairs in the Custard), one book of short stories (Twenty Inches of Monkey) and a book of critical essays Shakespeare in Baby Talk.
Meanwhile, here is what F Scott Fitzgerald mulled over:
Journal of a Pointless Life
Wore Out His Welcome
Your Cake
Jack a Dull Boy
Dark Circles
The Parvenu Hat
Talks to a Drunk
Tall Women
Birds in the Bush
Travels of a Nation
Don’t You Love It?
All Five Senses
Napoleon’s Coat
Tavern Music, Boat Trains
Dated
Thumbs Up
The Bed in the Ball Room
Book of burlesque entitled These My Betters
Title for bad novel: God’s Convict
Skin of His Teeth
Picture-Minded
Love of a Lifetime
Gwen Barclay in the Twentieth Century
Result- Happiness
Murder of My Aunt
Police at the Funeral
The District Eternity
Philosopher and critic George Steiner has even written a book – My Unwritten Books - about the seven books he has never managed to write which would cover:
- Chinese culture and Joseph Needham, expert in Chinese science
- 13th century Italian writer Cecco d’Ascoli (who himself left many works unpublished) and the concept of literary competition and envy
- Jewish identity
- a survey of formal education techniques in various countries
- what separates humans from animals
- the concept of privacy
- an erotic memoir with a focus on sexual linguistics
One of the most prolific non-finishers was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who loved making lists of possible books/poems to write and then not doing so. “You spawn plans like a herring”, Robert Southey told him, and Coleridge himself admitted that “I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands of this Wilderness, the World!” His Notebooks are stuffed full of ideas lists including this one:
An Essay on Tobit
On the art of prolonging Life – by getting up in a morning
On Marriage – in opposition to French Principles
Ode to a Looking Glass
Burnet’s de montibus in English Blank Verse
Escapes from Misery – a Poem – Halo round the candle – Sigh visible
Life of David – a Sermon
Wild Poem on Maniac
Ode on St Withold
Crotchets
Hymns to the Sun, the Moon, and the Elements – six hymns – in one of them to introduce a dissection of Atheism
Egomist, a metaphysical Rhapsody
Ode to Southey
Ode to a Moth – against accumulation
Berkley’s Maxims
Adventures of Christian, the mutineer
Military anecdotes
Hymn to Dr Darwin – in the manner of the Orphics
History of Phrases
Satire addressed to a Young Man who intended to study medicine at Edinburgh
Not The Great Gatsby
Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires
Trimalchio in West Egg
On the Road to West Egg
Under the Red, White and Blue
Gold-Hatted Gatsby
The High-Bouncing Lover
Choosing a title for your newly-finished masterpiece can be a tricky process. F Scott Fitzgerald came up with all the above ideas before finally settling on the famous one, largely because of his editor Max Perkins (although he still grumbled about it after it was published). And of course he was not alone. Ernest Hemingway toyed with I Have Committed Fornication But That Was in Another Country, and Besides the Wench Is Dead before sensibly settling on A Farewell to Arms. He also considered:
Love In War
Sorrow For Pleasure
Late Wisdom
The Enchantment
If You Must Love
World Enough and Time
In Praise of His Mistress
Every Night and All
Of Wounds and Other Causes
The Retreat from Italy
As Others Are
Love is one fervent fire
Kindlit without Desire
A World to See
Patriots Progress
The Grand Tour
The Italian Journey
The World’s Room
Disorder and Early Sorrow
An Italian Chronicle
The Time Exchanged
Death once Dead
They who get shot
The Italian Experience
Love in Italy
Love in War
The Sentimental Education
Education of the Flesh
The Carnal Education
The Sentimental Education of Frederick Henry
Thing That Has Been
Nights and Forever
In Another Country
Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow
The Peculiar Treasure
One Event Happeneth To Them All
One Thing For Them All
Nothing Better For A Man
Time of War
The World’s Romm
One Thing is Certain
The Long Home
So what is the best way of choosing a title? You could try the always popular Something’s Something approach - Midnight’s Children, Schindler’s List, Homer’s Daughter - , equations such as author Andy Martin’s useful ‘number + noun + “of” + noun’ (e.g. Seven Pillars of Wisdom) and various random title generators (some are very specific such as the online Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator which includes ‘The Cheers Effect: How and Why Everybody Knows Your Name). Lulu.com even offers an automated way of checking if your title is likely to be a bestseller, generally suggesting that books with slightly more abstract titles such as Agatha Christie’s ‘Sleeping Murder’ have the greatest chances of success.
Another way is simply to borrow the best bits of other people’s work, which is not only the way that Aldous Huxley usually went but can be turned into a Christmas quiz for the well read. So where do these Huxley titles come from originally? (answers at the bottom of the page, no peeking):
1. After Many a Summer Dies The Swan
2. Antic Hay
3. Beyond the Mexique Bay
4. The Doors of Perception
5. Eyeless in Gaza
6. Jesting Pilate
7. Those Barren Leaves
One problem with this method of choosing a title is that it requires you to be very well read (as Clive James has observed: “Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books”). This is exactly what Huxley was. He had read everything and for good measure even travelled with a half-sized edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to make sure he had something decent to read.
As good luck would have it, there’s a much easier way. Just open your collected works of Shakespeare and off you go, an approach which also bore fruit for Huxley who certainly perused his copies of The Tempest (Brave New World), Macbeth (Brief Candles), Hamlet (Moral Coils), and Henry IV Part 1 (Time Must Have A Stop – a bit of a cheat this one as the actual quote from Hotspur’s death speech is 'But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop').
Answers:
1. Tithonus by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. Edward II by Christopher Marlowe
3. Bermudas by Andrew Marvell
4. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by William Blake
5. Samson Agonistes by John Milton
6. Of Truth by Francis Bacon
7. The Tables Turned, William Wordsworth
Superb. Lists plus a random title generator is practically my ideal desert island setup