My answer is "Yes," but only because an unusual title will lure me to pick up the book and explore its first sentences. Not every quality book has a great title, nor does every interesting title lead to a first-rate read. But any author (or editor) who takes the time to create an unusual title has, in my opinion, at least the potential to come up with a solid first sentence and hopefully a compelling narrative and interesting characters. Worth a shot anyway when faced with the multitude of books available out there.
Below are some intriguing titles, their first sentences, and even their book jackets (should you wish to judge by a cover as well) that I have read or at least have on my list of books to check out. An (*) marks my favorites, but you be the final judge. Explore away!
Happy reading.
Fred
Our Mum -- or Nicola Fuller of Central Africa, as she has on occasion preferred to introduce herself -- has wanted a writer in the family as long as either of us can remember, not only because she loves books and has therefore always wanted to appear in them (the way she likes large, expensive hats, and likes to appear in them) but also because she has always wanted to live a fabulously romantic life for which she needed a reeasonably pliable witness as scribe.
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If you stick a hatpin in at Boston and drive it through the center of the earth, you come out very near the Bay of Islands. The first Europeans to go south of the equator expected to find a sort of looking-glass world, backward but recognizable, like people who resembled them but walked on their hands.
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Mum says, "Don't come creeping into our room at night." They sleep with loaded guns beside them on the bedside rugs. She says, "Don't startle us when we're sleeping."
"Why not?"
"We might shoot you."
"Oh."
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I'm sitting there in my den reading an article about the devastating effects of cyberphilia on the contemporary American family or what's left of it. Cyberphilia, in case you don't know by now, is the compulsion to operate and program a computer, in preference to all other activities (I don't own a computer. I am a cyberphilia).
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We were nuts about the mocha in the waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering's outpatient care center. The coffee isn't so good, and the hot chocolate is worse. But if, as Mom and I discovered, you push the "mocha" button, you see how two not-very-good things can come together to make something quite delicious. The graham crackers aren't bad either.
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In my five-year career as a teacher at a large elementary school in Chicago, I had rarely set foot in the cafeteria. In fact, I hadn't eaten a school lunch since the eleventh grade.
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When I was a child, my parents and teachers told me about a man who was very strong. They told me he could destroy the whole world. They told me he could lift mountains. They told me he could part the sea. It was important to keep this man happy. When we obeyed what the man commanded, he liked us. He liked us so much that he killed anyone who didn't like us.
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Amid the pine tree windbreaks and the foamy Pacific shore, Sea Ranch, California, is a wonderful place to be dumped.
Carl took a step toward the mirror and ran one finger along his temple where the bullet had grazed his head. The wound had healed, but the scar was clearly visible under his hair, if anyone cared to look. [Note: contains violence. F]
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My desk is shaped like a kidney and has a slight wobble. I have finally learned to draw the curtains to the small window in the parallelogram of senseless noise they call my office.
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On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddammit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something."
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If you're receiving this message then you have probably already made a startling and disturbing discovery regarding the nature of my scientific work.
Please forgive the unsettling nature of my appearance -- the holographic projector is my own invention and probably very lifelike apart from the change in scale, which I believe lends a dramatic effect.
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Franz Meyer stood up at the head of the table, glanced down, touched the cloth, and awaited our silence.
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In 1989 I went to Ireland for the first time. I don't know why it had taken so long. Some parts of the world you make a conscious effort to visit and others have to wait until fate delivers you there. When the moment arrived for me to set foot on the Emerald Isle, it was as a result of a badly written song.
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Among a long list of bizarre social customs that enchant and irritate a North American who has come to live in South America, one of the most revealing about national differences is the Despedida. The despedida is a highly ritualized leavetaking arranged by friends and family when you prepare to set out on a journey.
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My sister and I are staying at Grandpa Sawtooth's old house until our father, Chief Bigtree, gets back from the Mainland. It is our first summer alone in the swamp.
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Eleven-thirty at night, sweaty in his evening suit and shattered after a heavy night playing Rachmaninov, Mel Farran plodded out of the artists' exit on the south side of the Royal Festival Hall.
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There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.
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The idea of external return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has ofter perplexed other philosophers with it; to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitium! What does this mad myth signify?
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I was lying dead in the churchyard. An hour had crept by since the mourners had said their last sad farewells.
