For me, I feel this way about "A Canticle for Leibowitz."
It's an amazing post-apocalyptic sci-fi story, where Catholic monks in an isolated monastery in the deserts of the desolated Western United States work to preserve fragments of human knowledge that remain after a global cataclysm from warlords and roving bands of mutant-bandits…
The title… I find it a little unwieldy. A canticle, I believe, is a type of religious song, and Leibowitz is the founder of the order of monks in the monastery. But, perhaps it lacks the instant appeal of a name like "Dune," or "Ender's Game," or "The Road."
What is a book that is amazing, but isn't that well known, and maybe it could be better known if it had a different title?
(I'm purposefully not saying "better" title… For "A Canticle for Leibowitz," the title kind of fits the book well, because it's definitely offbeat and challenging in some ways… )
by sozh
2 Comments
I mean canticle is the most amazing boring book where nothing happens, that I would never recommend to anyone, that I couldn’t put down.
I loved Min Jin Lee’s book Pachinko and believe that most people would enjoy it if they wanted to give it a go. However, the name either sounds too foreign (leading people to think they wouldn’t understand it when in reality references to Japanese culture are rare and far in between), or the people who know what it means in Japanese are put off by the title (it’s a gambling machine, yet the book has nothing to do with gambling). So overall, I understood why it’s called that, but it probably would get more fame and love from people who don’t care about Japanese culture if it had a different title.