under the blanket

Judge books by their covers. Judge them by their titles too.

Drawn by the unfamiliar pairing of words, I picked up Amnesia Moon and now my head is swirling with images of the post-apocalyptic road trip of a man named Chaos and a girl covered in brown fur. The way I’ve simplified the plot makes it sound so juvenile, but it is a curiously gritty yet dreamy story about searching for a half-remembered love.

The author, Jonathan Lethem, also wrote Motherless Brooklyn, which is another fantastic title. [The story is about a small-time private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, in case you are interested. I’m not really into the whole hardboiled detective genre, but the excellent Edward Norton is set to make a movie of it, which was why I hunted down the book in the first place.]

Other equally evocative book titles...The Heart is a Lonely Hunter...Sputnik Sweetheart...Of Love and Other Monsters...One Hundred Years of Solitude [to which this blog vaguely alludes].

I already have the perfect title for the novel I’m never going to write -- Kismet Kittens. Now all I have to do is come up with some semblance of a plot revolving around felines and this thing called fate.

Instead of wasting time writing an imaginary book, I should be spending it on my overdue SARS essay. At the moment, all I have is a working title -- Global Coverage of a Global Outbreak. It’s not brilliant, but it will do for a school paper.