Titles.

[Qu Klaani]

Just started reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Hemmingway, to my mind, really has the best names for his books of any I've ever come across. So yeah, a thread about book titles:

What are your favourites? Why? What makes a good title for a book? Is stealing bits of poetry the best way? (the answer to that is yes) and so on and so forth.

[Jaya]

What makes a good title for a book? Is stealing bits of poetry the best way?

Yes. If someone else has already said something and it's awesomely good enough, why change it? I say use it.* I will think of my favourite book titles in due course.

*This does not condone plagiarism.

[Mockingbird]

Some of my favorites:

Evocative, out-of-context phrases that give you just enough of a glimpse into a story to make you want to see more. Hemingway is great at these: The Sun Also Rises, "Hills Like White Elephants." Also: Water for Elephants, The Things They Carried, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," Interpreter of Maladies.

Inscrutable titles that imply the tone of the book: The lyrical strangeness of A Swiftly Tilting Planet and "The Dark Soul of the Accordion," the oddball humor of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the self-conscious bravado of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Direct statements to the reader: "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," "How to Tell a True War Story," Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I think good titles are much more important for short stories just because they have to fight harder to get noticed.

[tyche]

I've not read it but i think that Do androids dream of electric sheep? is a brilliant title.

[aklebury]

Faulkner's titles are usually great as well: The Sound And The Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light In August, Absalom! Absalom!
And there's something about simplicity that also works quite well I think: Our Town

Wasn't there some study or something a while back that named 'His Dark Materials' as one of the most successful titles based on various factors?

[Mr Anderson]

Dances with Wolves, superb name.

[Aletheia Dolorosa]

I would say titles that kind of sum up what a book is about, but do so in either a lyrical or (and I can't think of a better way to say it apart from) 'hmm'-inducing way.

Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a good title. So are World Without End (by Ken Follett), 100 Years of Solitude and Love In The Time of Cholera (both by Gabriel García Marquez), Here Be Dragons by Sharon K. Penman, He Died With A Felafel In His Hand by John Birmingham, Across The Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn (who is really Gillian Rubinstein), We, The Haunted (a young-adult book I read when I was about 12 and the author of which I can't recall), Of Nightingales That Weep (Katherine Paterson's best book, in my opinion), A Moon For the Misbegotten by Eugene O'Neill, Wild Swans by Jung Chang, The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin and The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Some I like because they perfectly encapsulate the books, others merely for how evocative they are.

My personal favourite is Tomorrow, When The War Began by John Marsden.