2026, books, Business, Mysteries

Grade-B Titles?

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I just finished The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny (5 stars).  The main character has a tense relationship with her mom and early in the book came this:  “My mother loves a monster.  Now there’s the title of a Grade-B movie.”

It made me laugh and lead me to thinking about some other funny titles that I’ve read over the years.

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip Dick)
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Oliver Sachs)
  • How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You (Matthew Inman)
  • The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating (Elisabeth Bailey)
  • The 100–Year Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared (Jonas Jonasson)
  • Everyone Poops (Taro Gomi)
  • Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn)

Of course, there are a LOT of funny titles out there; I suppose authors think it will hook readers into picking up their books.  It certainly works on me.

Here are a few others I found online…

  • No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again (Edgardo Vega Yunque)
  • And To My Nephew Albert I Leave The Island What I Won Off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game (David Forrest)
  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Aimee Bender)
  • Shit My History Teacher Did Not Tell Me (Karl Wiggins)
  • Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor (Roger Welsch)

Of course, now I’ll have to read these too!

Any funny titles on your reading list lately?

 

 

54 thoughts on “Grade-B Titles?”

  1. Can’t think of any right now, but it’s early. May have to read the Aimee Bender, because I think lemon cake is a thing of joy. Wish I had some for breakfast!

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  5. You got some of mine, but mildly amusing, to me at least:
    – If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now, Christopher Ingraham
    – Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Stephanie Barron
    – The Bad Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, Joshua Hammer
    – Shrub (about George W. Bush), Molly Ivins
    – You’ve Got to Dance with Those What Brung You, Molly Ivins

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    2. “If you lived here you’d be home now” is an old real estate motto. I always thought of the alternative: “if you lived here you would have gotten nowhere”.

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  6. Tom Robbins was always a reliable source of funny titles:

    Another Roadside Attraction
    Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    Still Life with Woodpecker
    Jitterbug Perfume
    Skinny Legs and All
    Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
    Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

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  7. So was Lewis Grizzard:

    }Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A Good Beer Joint Is Hard to Find and Other Facts of Life

    Won’t You Come Home, Billy Bob Bailey?: An Assortment of Home-Cooked Journalism for People Who Wonder Why Clean Underwear Doesn’t Grow on Trees

    Don’t Sit Under the Grits Tree With Anyone Else but Me

    They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat

    If Love Were Oil, I’d Be About a Quart Low

    Elvis Is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself

    Shoot Low Boys – They’re Riding Shetland Ponies

    My Daddy Was a Pistol and I’m a Son of a Gun

    When My Love Returns From the Ladies Room, Will I Be Too Old To Care?

    Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny – You Know Them Taters Got Eyes

    Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night

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  8. Rise and Get Your Nose Out of That Book, Jacque!

    The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shafer.

    One of the most misleading titles was “Fear of Flying” by Erica Jong. When I was the Front Desk Librarian at the Grand Rapids Public Library, a patron came into the library seeking that book. The front desk was located in the reading lounge, which was crowded at lunch time and midafternoon with local business men. A woman walked up to me, loudly asking for Fear of Flying, going on to state,

    ” I am going on a trip to California and I am so afraid of flying.”

    Me: Ma’am, I don’t think that is the book you are looking for. (Lower voice) That is an erotic book.

    Her: Erratic? What is an erratic book?

    The business men put down the newpapers and stare at us.

    Me: No. Erotic. You know, sexy. It is a book about sex.

    Her: NO! I read there are treatments for fear of flying and that is what I want. Where is the book?

    Me: In the fiction stacks. The author is J-O-N-G.

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    2. I’ll always have a fun spot in my heart for Fear of Flying. I’m sure I’ve told the story before about how I tortured my mother by leaving it laying around the house.

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        1. It was really about a woman having an existential crises which she addresses by having a raunchy love affair. The most famous bit is her fantasy on a train about a “zipless _uck” – a long meditation in which she ruminates that in movies you never witness the unzipping and unbuttoning….

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  11. I have a book by Robert A Baker called “Stress analysis of a strapless evening gown”. Started it a few years ago, never finished it.

    Also I have a book something about why pizza always burns your mouth… can’t come up with the exact title.

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  12. Looking at the header photo, I notice that all the books and audiobooks are from libraries. A couple of the titles were mentioned on the Trail many moons ago and are obscure enough that I have to assume their presence here is a token of those mentions.
    All of which begs the question, discards from various libraries, an exceedingly ambitious library check out, or evidence of an inveterate library scofflaw?

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    1. I wish I could be a scofflaw. It’s just an old picture; it was taken during Covid when the library was not ready to take their books back yet. I was stacking them up in the dining room as I finished them, waiting for the day where I could return them.

      I had a short period of hope during that time that I would actually read all of my library books that were out and have to resort to reading some of the books that I own. But then the library started letting me check out books, even though it wasn’t ready to take books back yet. A brief hope.

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      1. By the time the library started taking books back, the pile was much bigger. In fact when I called the library to confirm that they were taking the books back, they told me to please not return them all at once!

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    1. Okay. I admit an implied reference to Trump’s pool.
      The whole story is the opportunity for algae to become our food and energy supply.

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  15. I like my titles
    Beneath a Quilted Sky

    Everything Is South of Here
    Tales of the Arrowhead

    The Deerstand
    Everything I’ve Never Done

    And a short story
    Beau Rudenfels, Wily Southpaw of Raccoon, Minnesota

    None stand up to their titles, except Wily Southpaw is a decent story.

    Clyde

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  17. I had an audiobook a couple of month ago called I See You’ve Called in Dead, which I thought was pretty engaging.

    I always liked Raymond Carver’s titles like What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

    There is a Frederik Backman book called My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry; I haven’t read it so far, but I do like the title so perhaps I’ll get to that one someday.

    One title I always remember is Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail. Since it was a song before it was a book, the iambic meter tends to lodge in the memory.

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