The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

This isn’t anything to do with comics or science fiction, but it is an annual bit of fun in the British bookselling calendar which I always look forward to and I thought you might get a smile from – the Bookseller magazine’s annual Diagram Prize, which is awarded to the oddest-titled published book of the year. The award this year went to If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs by an author going under the nom de plume of Big Boom, of which deputy Bookseller editor Joel Rickett commented “So effective is the title that you don’t even need to read the book itself,” adding that it “makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes.” The latter statement would be a huge relief to those of us who despair of increasingly inane waves of so-called self-help books flooding our bookstore shelves (surely if you are practising self help you shouldn’t be following some (often unqualified) ‘expert’s’ advice??), but sadly I suspect it will not mark the end of that particularly annoying genre.

The winner beat off competition this year from such superb examples of fine literature as I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen, How to Write a How to Write Book, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, Cheese Problems Solved and People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood. Personally I want to see a graphic novel adaptation of I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen. Previous winners include such utter gems as Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (hand on heart I can say that in a previous career I have shelved and sold copies of that one – brilliant Russ Meyers-like cover), People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It and the blistering read that is The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.

And these are all genuine, by the way – each year the Bookseller asks folk in the trade to send in possible titles to compete and all come from genuine books which have actually been published. A nice bit of fun on a dull, gray Friday morning. I wonder if we should try thinking on some of the oddest titles from the world of comics, graphic novels and science fiction? Any suggestions, folks? Any title which made you giggle or raise an eyebrow from any published comic, SF&F novel or graphic novel (or webcomic, come to that) in the last year or so? Come on, I’m sure there must be some contenders out there! (source: the BBC)