Bit of a silly post, but one that I think could be a lot of fun. As I was browsing the shelves of my local store the other day, I stumbled upon Dan Brown's newest book titled…
The Secret of Secrets.
Like… are you serious? THAT'S THE BEST YOU COULD COME UP WITH??? I don't even care if it makes more sense if you read the book, there is not an explanation in the world that can be stirred up which will convince me that The Secret of Secrets is the best possible title somebody could have come up with for that book.
For the record, I haven't read it. This is not me saying the book is bad. I'm just saying the title is bad and lazy beyond comprehension.
So it got me thinking. What's the worst title you've ever encountered in the wild? Bonus points if you read that book and can offer whether or not your opinion about the title changed after reading it.
by PsyferRL
26 Comments
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. What? Maybe it makes sense if you’ve read it.
A lot of modern fantasy that follows the *X of Y and Z* style puts me off because I take it as a sign they’re just formulaic sloplit because of how generic the titles are. That doesn’t necessarily mean they *are* sloplit, but I’m put off from reading them because of how prevalent the style is among low-effort cash-grab fantasy.
One of my least favorite books was Nightbitch. I was just cringing the entire time.
Would love to hear someone’s argument for the title, but I think All the Pretty Horses is a bad one. Awesome book though… all his other titles go pretty hard so this one in particular has always stood out to me.
*The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women.* by John Knox.
Both for title and content..
“Poppy war” 😭😭
I once found a different book about the Clutter family murders called….In Colder Blood.
I know clowning on long Japanese titles that spell out the entire premise is old hat but I still don’t think they’ve done anything better than ‘Do You Love Her Mother and Her Standard Attack Which Hits All Enemies Twice’
(the novel even had a special launch event where if you brought your actual mother when you purchased the novel you’d get special bonus merch.)
*Billy and the Clone-asaurus.* I’m glad they went with plan B, and gave us *Jurassic Park* instead.
*Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him … The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive.*
_The Secret of Secrets_ is the name an author writing a Dan Brown satire would use.
It. Did Stephen King consider all the poor librarians and bookstore employees who would be fighting for their lives trying to look that up in their computer systems?
Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight, I’ve never read it, but the title has lodged itself in my brain the way an image of a horrible bus crash does.
[deleted]
Canada (the 2012 novel by Richard Ford)
Eunoia
A book of terrible poems with a silly gimmick of only using one vowel throughout each of the chapters. Got attention, made money, quickly forgotten. This was the novelty flavour cup noodles of poetry.
I love the book, but *All You Need Is Kill* is some high quality Engrish.
Not the WORST title, but surely the most redundant subtitle I’ve seen: *Hiking Nevada’s county high points : a hiking guide to Nevada’s highest county summits*
It’s a top 5 book for me, but I hate the title, “This is how it always is” by Laurie Frankel . Or “this is how it’s always been” or “it’s always been this way”.
See what I mean? It’s such a stupid title, and the book itself is so good.
The other day on Goodreads I saw someone finish “Everyone on this Train is a Suspect”
Which just sounds like the Simplified English version of Murder on the Orient Express.
qualquer um que passar de 3 palavras
[secretum secretorum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretum_Secretorum)
I dislike like **”The [adjective] Life of [full name]”** titles for any piece of media. It feels tryhard and cliche idk it just turns me off from ever picking them up.
The Secret of Secrets is right in line with what I would expect from Dan “Umberto Eco but for imbeciles” Brown and his target audience.
I do wonder if there was any concern about confusion with the trash self-help book (but I repeat myself) merely titled The Secret, though.
*Rogues’ Gallery: The Birth of Modern Policing and Organized Crime in Gilded Age New York*
There’s an error in the damn title, and that makes me think that the history is not going to be very well researched.
(“Rogues” never has a possessive apostrophe. The original rogues gallery was a wall of photographs that the NYPD had taken of arrestees, everybody could come in and see the pictures, and it was a big deal because it was early days for photography. So it isn’t a gallery that belongs to rogues, it’s a gallery that features them. Like an art gallery, which is not called an art’s gallery.)
How the hell you could write a book like this and get that wrong… Yeah, I don’t want to see what else he screwed up.
Last of the Mohicans.
There are still Mohicans. And Cooper wrote his characters based on Mohegans, not Mohicans.
As a side note, Dan Brown may be the worst published author I have ever read. I’m glad the quality of the books are starting to be reflected in the titles.