What the hell is an Iliad, anyway? (If it had two Ls, it would support the view of Homer as proto-rapper, but no. . .)

Beats the previous title, Tha Izizlad.

http://www.gizoogle.com/

Homer, the blind, the Chuck D of his day
Was the illest MC when the Greeks held sway
He told the people, before there was writin'
About a cyclops, some frigates, and fightin'

I gotta put in a vote here for John Steinbeck. Really. Of Mice and Men is only the most awful. The Grapes of Wrath is pretty damn bad. As is East of Eden. I find it hard, though, to characterize their badness. Is it the repeated "of"? Something about their rhythm? (It's bad when the only two-syllable word in three titles is "Eden.") Or is it just the overload of portent that they carry, the need that each be spoken in James Earl Jones's voice?

Oh, but wait. You said "literarily worthy." My bad.

No, KF, I'll back you up and call in-bounds on Steinbeck. We may prefer a prose artist like Henry James (who has a few infelicitious titles to live up to, in particular The Princess Cassimassima), but Steinbeck is well above, say, in the realm of the sort of cookie-cutter adventure fiction or romance dreck that I think of as the most fertile environment for the growing of awful titles. No, that's a legitimate beef.

Arguably, it's the portent-load that's the real problem, but I also now see how a writer's aggregate title choices are sort of the real problem. I mean, if Steinbeck had just varied his pattern a bit, "East of Eden" might have passed. Maybe Grapes should have been something jauntier, like, I dunno... Joad Trip? Clearly (Cannery Row), he was capable of good titles.

East of Eden reminds me of This Side of Paradise, which also suffers from portent-mongering. But as it's F. Scott's first, I feel forgiving, I think.

You know, now that I think about it, if we're frowning on portentous titling habits, we've got to cast a cold eye over on Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner -- also, like Steinbeck, a fan of the "weighty reference" strain in titling -- gave us The Sound and the Fury, Absalom! Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Right there, that's a lot of, I dunno, self-importance? Throw in As I Lay Dying and you've got yourself one tall stack of pancakes. But, arguable, his books measure up to their titles more succesfully than Steinbeck's. Which might well redeem them.

Maggie, Girl of the Streets, always elicits giggles.

Going back to Victoriana -- always a fertile period for heavy-breathing writing, I'm astonished to discover I don't find a lot of terrible titles. I think that Wuthering Heights is a pretty bad title, mostly because there's just never really been any excuse for Wuthering. And Trollope has some clunkeroos. Anybody who would pick up Framley Parsonage on the strength of its title is...well, maybe they were different back then. But Dickens doesn't have too many terrible ones, except for A Tale of Two Cities, which is awful for more than one reason, not the least of which is that it immediately suggests a naughty spoonerism.

Moby-Dick
Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Billy Budd

Really. Typee a Peep!

(Pierre and the Ambiguities must've been somebody's band, somewhere....)

Melville's got my vote, poor fellow.

"Grapes of Wrath." I never realized how bad that was until I read these posts. It's hard to hear the badness of titles that were delivered to me as "great" and "classic" before I was discerning.

"Grapes of Wrath." That's just ridiculous.

ming, I'd add "Omoo" to the list of bad Melville titles.

"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" strikes me as strained, as well. Of course, I haven't read it yet, but I bet the simpler "The Half-Blood Prince" would have served just as capably, without sounding so - what? Patterned? Factory-molded?

It's funny -- I thought about Melville earlier, and decided I wouldn't go there, but that's perhaps because I really like Moby-Dick (the book). But yeah, Typee: a Peep is pretty bad. And Billy Budd, too. Of course, Moby-Dick is so bad it's good, I think. A good case for Herman.

As long as I am inviting all kinds of cosmic payback by mocking titles of great books by long-dead geniuses, may I add that The Blithedale Romance is among the most uninviting phrases Hawthorne possibly could have devised, and All's Well That Ends Well is bottom of the barrel among Shakespeare titles, though The Merry Wives of Windsor is a close second.

As for J.K. Rowling's upcoming opus: given that the financial health of my employer is deeply connected to the number of copies of Harry Potter #6 that get sold this year, I feel I should say that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is clearly the most brilliant title applied to any volume in the history of publishing. All right-thinking people will want to own several. Pre-order yours today, preferably at a large chain establishment that serves coffee.

At the risk of public stoning, I nominate that timeless baseball classic "The Catcher In Their Eye"

(further evidence: "Franny & Zooey")

I was stooping for a stone when I remembered Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters.
Grapes of Wrath is not either ridiculous; it's just tortured. The original verse refers to loosing the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, and all that, which implies that God's gonna get drunk and kick some tail, military-style. So these migrant farm workers are cultivating (get it?)...seeds of discontent. Thanks, I'll be here all week.
I find it hard to believe that Love in the Time of Cholera will age well.
Arms and the Man shows chutzpah, if you're counting plays.
Leaves of Grass is a head scratcher.

Getting my post-work benadryl on, let's imagine the hypothetical marketing meetings from which these titles emerged. Among the almost-but-not-quite:
Cholera in the Time of Love
Wrath of Grapes
Lower the Boom-Beams
Franny Does Zooey
Harry Potter, Girl of the Streets

ack snuff

Does anyone happen to know Where the title Iliad came from it is very important for mean to know