Not odd enough?
While all that Booker hoopla was going on yesterday, the winner of yet another august literary prize – the Diagram Oddest Title of the Year award – was being announced. Administered by the U.K.-based Bookseller magazine, this year’s prize went to The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague. Second prize went to a book called Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan, and third prize went to Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.
In the wake of the Stray Shopping Carts win, however, some pundits are wondering if the prize has lost some of its relevance. In her blog on the Guardian’s website, Sian Pattenden wonders if the quality of the chosen titles has begun to decline since the prize’s inception 29 years ago:
[This year’s prize goes to] the relatively straightforward Stray Shopping Carts […]. In the halcyon days, entries included Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice; Weeds in a Changing World; Living with Crazy Buttocks; and Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.
But maybe, Pattenden goes on, the judges just aren’t looking hard enough, and she invites readers to submit the more noteworthily bizarre titles they’ve come across in their browsing travels. Not many readers have posted responses yet, but hopefully they will soon.
