What we have here is a failure to communicate…
Summer’s ending, and with it, the Summer Reading Season… So, as readers shift back into gear, and think back over the books that occupied their breaks, Dan Wilbur offers Better Book Titles, where one will find such clarifying emendations as:
AKA, Guns, Germs, and Steel: Jared Diamond
AKA, The Symposium: Plato
AKA, The DaVinci Code: Dan Brown
AKA, The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo: Stieg Larsson
One can find many, many more– and submit one’s own– here.
As we vacuum the sand from our volumes, we might wish a happy birthday to author Jacqueline Susann; she was born on this date in 1921. Having been disappointed by her luck as an actress and a model, Ms. Susann turned to the typewriter. Her first novel, Every Night, Josephine (or as Better Book Titles might have it, My Poodle and Me), was a best-seller. Her second, Valley of the Dolls (or, a la BBT, Booze, Babes, and Pills) was the best-seller: it topped the chart for 22 weeks, and by the time of Susann’s death in 1974, had sold over 17 million copies, making it the best-selling novel of all time. According to The Internet Public Library, it’s still Number One, with current cumulative sales of 30 million (two million copies ahead of runner-up Gone With the Wind).
Jacqueline Susann (source)