There are award longlists, shortlists and winners announced every other day, it seems (cf. NBCC Awards from last night, for one.) But my new favorite has to be The Bookseller/ Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, which you can vote for at the UK book trade magazine’s website (scroll down and the voting options are available.) The Independent’s Louise Jury has more on the competition, which has been run by The Bookseller magazine since 1978 and invites publishers, booksellers and libraries to submit their choices of the strange and odd. I mean, how can you not love book titles like HOW GREEN WERE THE NAZIS? or BETTER NEVER TO HAVE BEEN: THE HARM OF COMING INTO EXISTENCE? In the latter book, author David Benatar argues that one suffers “quite serious harms” by coming into existence that “could not have befallen one had one not come into existence”. Which makes it the ultimate existential crisis book, I suppose…
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