Entitled to success: a rant.

Titles are important.

I was put off reading the hilarious Diary of a Nobody for years because I thought it was going to be a dreary trudge through existential angst. The same thing happened with The Catcher In The Rye (I'm still slightly confused: is a catcher more or less what in cricket I'd call a wicket-keeper? Ah well, at least I know now that in this case Rye isn't the town on the South Coast of England).

I wasn't attracted by To Kill A Mockingbird, either, partly because it leaves one grammatically rather in the air.

Of course all three of these books have done very well indeed. But I still don't think the titles helped.

In the Book That Deserved To Do Better section of The Guardian newspaper there's a piece from a publisher that says: I was stung and puzzled that more people did not read Otto Dov Kulka's "Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death".

And I'm afraid I had to laugh.

Look, the purpose of a title is a) to let people know what the book's about, and b) to sound inviting. Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death does neither (apparently the book is a very fine meditation on the Holocaust).

But you can't tell what it is from that title, and landscapes and metropolis both have a strong whiff of pretension to an English speaker.

A View of the City of Death.

That's a book to send shivers of dread and pity down the spine.

You know, I think I'd have to read that.

Word Not To Use Today, Especially In A Title: metropolis. This word comes from the Greek words mētēr, mother and polis, city.