Broken Angles Flow Uphill

You may have noticed the rise of increasingly long book titles (that often sound like sentence fragments.)

The Girl on the Train

What you may not be aware of is that we’re simply running out of one or two word combinations that haven’t already been claimed. Everything from The Martian through to The Big Sleep has been used. You can’t chuck a noun without hitting an Isaac Asimov novel, a Margaret Atwood poem, and two Stephen King short stories before it touches the ground.

To those wondering why this is a problem – to those wondering why we shouldn’t just proudly claim 1984 for our Pac-Man-centric period-piece* murder mystery – I say: Try searching Goodreads for Possession.

(*I just made myself feel old, but if I were reading about about 1967 in 1997…)

When Breath Becomes Air

Of course, in this regard the Victorians might have been a step ahead. It’ll be a long time before we come back around to needing to re-use The Life and Extraordinary Adventures, the Perils and Critical Escapes, of Timothy Ginnadrake, That Child of Chequer’d Fortune

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