FMK #27: Judge A Book By Its Title

[melannen]

Last week's winners were not what I expected! But F goes to The Red Tent and K goes to The Magicians (which is WAY more hated than I had realized! For good reason apparently.)

How FMK works, short version: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

This week's theme: I have no idea what this book is about, I'm pretty sure I only have it for the title.

Poll #18957 FMK #27: Judging Books By Titles

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

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Not Like Other Girls: A Novel by Rosa Carey (1884)

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F
10 (47.6%)

M
1 (4.8%)

K
10 (47.6%)

The Entailed Hat by GATH (1884)

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F
10 (55.6%)

M
3 (16.7%)

K
5 (27.8%)

Adventures of Sally by P. G. Wodehouse (1922)

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F
14 (53.8%)

M
6 (23.1%)

K
6 (23.1%)

The Vanishing Liner by George Morse (1934)

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F
1 (7.1%)

M
2 (14.3%)

K
11 (78.6%)

Daughter to Diana by Allene Corliss (1935)

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F
8 (44.4%)

M
2 (11.1%)

K
8 (44.4%)

Airman's Wife by Renee Shann (1944)

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F
3 (17.6%)

M
2 (11.8%)

K
12 (70.6%)

Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote (1958)

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F
10 (35.7%)

M
3 (10.7%)

K
15 (53.6%)

Sister Cat by Felix Gould (1963)

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F
10 (55.6%)

M
1 (5.6%)

K
7 (38.9%)

Don't Embarrass the Bureau by Bernard Conners (1973)

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F
9 (52.9%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
8 (47.1%)

The Toothache Tree by Jack Galloway (2001)

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M
8 (53.3%)

K
7 (46.7%)

The Fattening Hut by Pat Collins (2003)

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F
3 (17.6%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
14 (82.4%)

Sea Glass by Anita Shreve (2002)

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F
9 (52.9%)

M
4 (23.5%)

K
4 (23.5%)

Swell by Corwin Ericson (2011)

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F
2 (12.5%)

M
1 (6.2%)

K
13 (81.2%)

Comments

[alexseanchai]

There is no F on Toothache Tree?

[melannen]

Oops! It was supposed to! Maybe its tooth hurts too much and it doesn't feel like f?

[katherine]

So many titles making me wonder!

The Toothache Tree is missing an F option.

Trees don't have teeth so maybe it generates toothaches in people? Or it is a tree with teeth that hurt it? Poor tree.

[melannen]

I had been thinking maybe it was a tree that cured toothache? But idk! Iirc that's a older selfpub and has no summary on the covers, just a photo of a tree.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, Google tells me there are several American species called that with their common name, and people chewed on some bits of them because they numb the gums and mouth and help toothaches. They have these spiny spikes on their trunks so the cover does seem to show one of it.

There apparently also is some attraction in Kathmandu with that name where you can ask a holy tree stump for divine intervention against your toothache by nailing a coin to it.

[melannen]

I think I was thinking the "leave an offering" sort but "bark is actually medicinal" works too.

...I appear to live in the teeny tiny bit of the east coast that's to far north for the southern one and too far south for the northern one. Story of our life! Although we'll probably get the southern one soon- we already have devils-walking-stick and we're supposed to be to northerly for that too.

[katherine]

I found it on Goodreads and ... that is a spiky-looking tree on the cover.

[melannen]

... that goodreads summary is not at all what I was expecting, and I am not sure how a story about a man holding a kid captive is going to be "funfilled" and "heartwarming" but okay. (I suppose "the ransom of red Chief" managed it.)

[sheliak]

I voted F on Don't Embarrass the Bureau in the hopes that the title refers to furniture rather than an organization. The Entailed Hat and The Toothache Tree are also pleasantly surreal.

[melannen]

Sadly I think it means the FBI, based on the cover.

The Entailed Hat is locally famous but it had better not win because as I was writing this my mom loaned my copy to a friend of hers...

[gehayi]

I found a review of Daughter to Diana in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle for Monday, June 10, 1935. It really must be seen to be believed.

ALLENE CORLISS'S "Daughter to Diana" brings up the subject of the mother who didn't want to grow old. but who had a daughter who would grow up. Things come to a pretty pass when mother and daughter make sheep's eyes at the same man and there is the very dickens to pay when the young one happens to see him kissing the old lady in the moonlight. Diana, the mother, was also something of a conniver, as witness the way she spread gossip about Julian and Lou Ann, so that Karen, the daughter, was nigh on to getting broken-hearted. The move was a bad one, for it almost threw Karen into the arms of Greg, but what transpired to bring smiles to the faces of the true lovers and a proper happy ending had best be left to the reader. More serious, indeed, is the author's notion that Dartmouth rows a crew at Poughkeepsie. Karen, always fond of the underdog, is going to cheer, we are told, for the big Green boat, and that ought to be astonishing news to Dartmouth alumni and to Dartmouth undergraduates, too, It might have been overlooked and charged to the license allowed the novelist, but for the fact that Miss Corliss has the rest of the party rooting for California and for Columbia, which, I understand, really do row down through the bridges from Kruin Elbow. It seems that Julian was a Dartmouth man and that is why Karen wanted to cheer for the invisible lads from Hanover. If Miss Corliss had really wanted to give Karen an underdog to cheer for, why didn't she send her up to the New Haven Bowl to see Dartmouth play football with the Yales, a game at which the Green has never beaten the Blue?

[melannen]

WOW that's amazing. Sadly not about neopagan flappers I guess, but still, wow.

[seekingferret]

I suddenly desperately want someone to write a book review column where they persistently ignore the plot of the book they're reviewing and complain ad nauseum about tiny sports-related errors. A review of The Great Gatsby would just be a long rant about how Shoeless Joe Jackson was not involved in the Black Sox scandal. I would read it religiously.

[melannen]

So would I!

[birke]

...I'm changing my vote. Thanks.

[marginaliana]

It is unsurprising to me that I feel excited about both Don't Embarrass the Bureau and The Entailed Hat. Although I also hope that the bureau is a piece of furniture.

Voted K for Airman's Wife purely because I hate this whole trend (it was a thing that early, seems like!) of having the woman be defined by the man in book titles. UGH.

[melannen]

Who knows, maybe the Airman in question was a WASP pilot! (Okay admittedly that seems unlikely.)

I think I bought that one because I have quite a few books written in the 40s about airmen (because.... fighter pilots. We all have our weaknesses okay) and I thought for fairness I should get the other side of the story.

[petra]

Point of order: anyone who owns a P. G. Wodehouse book and has read a P. G. Wodehouse book owns it for the author, surely?

[melannen]

You would think, but sometimes one is given books by relatives who have no idea who Wodehouse is just because they have one's RL name in the title. :P

(sometimes one failed out of Jeeves & Wooster in about chapter 2 due to embarrassment squick and got rid of all of one's Wodehouse except the one with one's name in the title that was a gift from a relative.)

I did manage to enjoy, um, it must have been Enter Psmith, and a lot of Jeeves & Wooster pastiche, so I have a idea of what a Wodehouse novel probably involves, but I know nothing about the specifics of that one or whether it's one of his that will actually work for me, I literally only own it for the title.

(The one that probably is a cheat is Breakfast at Tiffany's, which I only own because of the song, but I am aware that the song is named after the movie named after the book and not the reverse.)