The only problem is, surely, when you've run out of it

I feel I have blogged about this before but book titles are all important. Oh okay maybe not all important but they are important, damnit. Even more so these days when the Dan Brown's of the world, resplendant with their shiny covers and dull titles, sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rest of us.

Titles like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or the similarly titled but very very different The Man Who Was Thursday are the equivalent of movie trailers: they wet our appetite and make us want to pick up the book in question. At least they do for me.

So I have enjoyed this year’s shortlist of contenders for The Bookseller’s so-called diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year, my favourites of which must be I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen, How to Write a How to Write Book and Cheese Problems Solved.

Possibly still not a patch on last year’s winner (The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification) but somewhat amusing nonetheless. And has anyone got a copy of that that cheese solving one?