Casting around for a subject on a day when the household schedule has gone to pot, I decided to Google "best books never written" to see if anything caught my fancy. And I was rewarded. Chances are you have dreamed of a book that you would like to read. I know I have. This dreaming usually occurs after I've read a near miss book -- one that almost satisfies but seems wanting either in style, characterization, plot, or some other literary quality.
But do you suppose authors dream about books never written that they'd like to write but know they never will? I'd bet on it! We've all read books of fiction, but let's take some time to consider fictitious books.
Perhaps the most famous device associated with books that never existed are the ones authors create within the books they have written. The second most famous has to be the kid joke titles written by authors with silly punny names.
The Guradian cites books that exist only as books in literature. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's eponymous self referential guide book is probably the most well known. Can you think of other books-within-a book in the world of literary fiction? Wish I'd paid more attention!
Silly titles abound, left over from our childhood imaginings. . .
The Wild Years by Al Gore
George Foreman's Big Book of Baby Names
The Amish Phone Book
How To Dance by Sheik Yerbouti
Wheels in China by Rick Shaw
And in the mold of Car Talk Radio credits, the adults in the room try to do better with this extensive list of the punniest volumes never to see the light of day. My favorites include:
Is This Love?, by Midas Welby
A Foggy Tomorrow, by Hazel B. Thicke
The Haunted Manor, by Hugo Phirst
Stupid Cow Jokes, by Bo Veen
GoodReads has a game. If you're an addict of this kind of trivia game, here's another. Play along. Then come back and tell us your score.
A game of my own that instantly creates titles of books never written only requires the player to think of a title of a real book, modify it slightly and voila! Sometimes I wish that the made up titles were the ones that got written while the real titles remained blessedly unknown to man. Here's an example:
The daVinci Cod, which is, in fact, part of the title of a real book. Another, From Here to Paternity. And another, War and Peas. And (eeuuuwww) Great Expectorations. Making these up is a fun game to play with your kids on a long car trip.
The ultimate "source" on all things unwritten can be found at the Uncyclopedia, which tells us a little known "lump of bureaucracy" known as the "Library of the Untitled" collects works that: "Ought to be written by somebody, or have not been written, and thank goodness for that." Two of its more famous (ahem) titles are: The Truth About The Little Light In Your Refrigerator Marcus E. Sucram and Reducing Human Stupidity For Dummies. How invaluable they would have been. A related think tank has even come up with an explanation for why books like these never get written. Here it is expressed mathematically.
There. That's enough fun for one night.
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