Books with Interesting Titles

Hello! Welcome to another Top Ten Tuesday! Today we’re supposed to talk about book quotes, but I did one on my previous blog and can’t think of any new quotes, so I’ll do something slightly different. What do we like about quotes? Usually their excellent wordsmithing. So I thought I’d go along similar lines and find some books with excellent titles.

It’s really hard to come up with a great title for your book. I think these ones did a great job.

1. Pox Romana—Colin Elliott. One of the books I read last year has a title that I thought was pretty catchy. We’ve all heard of the Pax Romana—the peace that Rome brought (although whether it was actually peaceful is up for debate)—but this book is about a plague that went through Rome during the time of Marcus Aurelius. So I think the little play on words, calling the book Pox Romana, was a cute way of describing this.

2. A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—Emma Southon. While we’re on the subject of Ancient Rome, there’s a movie that came out in 1966 called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum… but this book is all about murder in Ancient Rome, which usually isn’t that funny. I read this book in 2024, so it’s been a while, but Emma Southon’s books can be pretty entertaining, even if she is talking about murder, so I can’t tell you if this particular book is funny, but it probably is.

3. The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting—Natalie C. Parker. I haven’t read this book, and I’m not sure if it would be my cup of tea or not, but this really is an awesome title. Assassin and babysitting are not two words you typically hear in the same sentence—or title. It did make me a little curious to find out a little more about the book, which is one of the advantages of having a good book title.

A lot of the time an author doesn’t pick the title of the book that ends up in the bookstore, so having the perfect title is not essential when querying a book. However, it can pique an agent’s interest if you have an awesome title like this one.

4. The Last Year of the War—Susan Meissner. I picked this title for this week’s list because it has a double meaning. This story is a dual timeline story. In one timeline, the main character is a young German girl who ends up in an internment camp and befriends a Japanese girl. After the war, they lose touch with each other. In the other timeline, the two ladies are old: one is battling dementia, and the other one (unknown to the other until the end of the book) is battling another illness, which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t read it yet. I’ve always liked this title for how clever it was.

5. Take a Chance on Me—Elizabeth Eulberg. This is another book on today’s list that I haven’t read, but who can resist a book with a title that shares the name of an ABBA song? When I was looking at books for today’s post, this song started going through my head, which was probably the point. One of the main characters is a busker, so there’s a musical element to this story as well. Which is good, because I might be a little disappointed if a book with such a great musical title had no musicality to it at all.

I wonder if I could have done a whole post on books with ABBA song titles? Last year I went on a cruise and there was a trivia game where we had to name the ABBA song title. I did terribly—they have so many songs that I didn’t know about! Too late now, I guess.

6. In the Garden of Beasts—Erik Larson. This is a book I recently reread, after being reminded of it when I read Defying Hitler. Why do I think this is a clever book title? Well, for one, the main characters in this book were living in Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and 1934, around the time that Hitler was coming to power and was starting to pass some of his draconian laws. The other thing that I thought was clever about this title, and I didn’t realize it the first time I read this book (even though they stated it in the book), was that the main characters lived near the Tiergarten, which is a famous park in Berlin. Tiergarten means “Garden of Animals” if you translate it into English, but it can also be translated as “Garden of Beasts” as well. The people leading Germany at the time were fairly beastly.

7. Las Marcas de la Muerte—Veronica Roth. So the English title of this book, Carve the Mark, is nice, but wouldn’t make my list. However, Las Marcas de la Muerte, or The Marks of Death if you translate it into English, has quite a nice ring to it, I think. And it’s pretty appropriate too, because in this book, whenever someone kills somebody else, they mark the death on their skin.

8. I Love You Like It’s 1999—A.J. Pine. If you’re old enough to remember the turn of the millennium, then you probably remember Prince’s song “1999”, with the line “tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999,” and that line probably went through your mind when you saw the title. In this book, the main character, who was in college in 1999, travels back to that year when she enters a mysterious Blockbuster Video. While the supporting characters seem to be a little more worried about the Y2K bug than I remember happening at the time, it was a fun book. And the title is perfect for the story.

9. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales—Oliver Sacks. This is another book I haven’t read, but am a little curious about the title. How could you mistake your wife for a hat? The book has four stars on Goodreads, so it might be a good book? I’m not sure if it’s the book for me, but I’m really curious about the hat thing.

10. A Dream of Spring—George RR Martin. My guess is that this book will eventually be finished with a coauthor sometime after this guy dies. He is 77 years old, after all. Let’s say he published Winds of Winter this year (ha ha—it doesn’t even have a release date yet). It would have taken 15 years to write this novel. If he took 15 years for his next novel, it wouldn’t come out until he was 92 years old? I don’t know who would finish this series (Brandon Sanderson has said he’s not right for the job), but his estate will probably want to find someone to finish the series. At any rate, the book title is appropriate on multiple levels. One, the characters, going through a long winter, are really going to dream of spring returning, and two, the readers are kind of dreaming that this book may come out someday.

So here are ten book titles that I like for some reasons. Do you have a favorite book title? And since this week was supposed to be about book quotes, do you have a favorite book quote?

Next week I’ll be back to the regular topic, since it’s a genre freebie, and I already wrote it.