theBookseller.com has announced its shortlist for the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.
Candidates are:
- I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen by Jasper McCutcheon
- How to Write a How to Write Book by Brian Piddock
- Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues by Catharine MacKinnon
- Cheese Problems Solved, edited by P.L.H. McSweeney
- If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs by Big Boom
- People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood by Dee Gordon
Last year's winner, you'll recall, was The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification.
Prize coordinator Horace Bent said "I must pay homage to those books that narrowly missed out on a shortlist place. These were, in no particular order: Drawing and Painting the Undead; Stafford Pageant: The Exciting Innovative Years 1901–1952; and Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground. All sound like they are positively thrilling reads, and I do hope that the authors will try again next year. Honourable mention should also go to two titles that were ruled out because they were published too long ago: an unlikely-sounding HR manual called Squid Recruitment Dynamics, and the fascinating anthropological tome Glory Remembered: Wooden Headgear of Alaska Sea Hunters."
The winner will be decided by public vote (poll here) and announced on 28 March.
