In Shambles ❀˖°

Loo…ong!

Here and there on my bookshelves are books with impressively short titles: Silk, Holes, Aura, Dune, The Pearl, The Strain, Jane Eyre, Snow Country, Schoolgirls, The Bathroom, The Witcher, Life for Sale,… They’re all great titles that manage to convey the spirit of the stories and pique my curiosity with just one or two words.

But there’s something poetic about titles that are long. Confession of a Shopaholic, Flying Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, And Then There Were None, The Sons of Great Bear, 2000 Leagues Under the Sea, At the Mountain of Madness, The Crab With the Golden Claw, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Three Men in a Boat – To Say Nothing of the Dog, The Story of a Snail Who Discovered the Importance of Being Slow.

books with long titles

“I love huge books with lengthy words, and tiny books with concise sentences,” Grant Snider once confessed in his witty picture book I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf. I’m half like him. Lengthiness and brevity, radically I appreciate both, but emotionally, the scale seems heavier on the wordy side. Those poetic titles seem to know how to caress my imagination. And their intonations when reading aloud are like melodies pouring into my ears.

I wasn’t always paid attention to titles. I would judge a book by its premise and, to be more sure, read a few pages to see if the writing style appealed to me. But when I got into advertising, and was frequently scolded for writing unnecessarily long headlines, that I began to look at titles and headlines with a new eye. Long and verbose are two different things. The book titles I mentioned above all have lots of words, but each has a reason to be there; no word is superfluous, and no word can be cut or replaced without altering the meaning or emotion of the entire sentence.

Not only books, but movies are also full of examples of titles so long that they could fill a couple lines in a notebook. There are two anime series that, in my opinion, have very witty, very long, and very creative episode titles.

First up is One Piece. There’s about a dozen words in each episode title. It’s usually split into two parts: main title above and subtitle below. The brilliance of One Piece’s titles lies in their ambiguity. They never reveal more than necessary, only dropping enough information to arouse curiosity. Some of the titles I’m most impressed with from One Piece are:

If there were only one sentence instead of two, these titles would still be fine. “Disappearing Crew”, “Impel Down Level 5,5”, “Marine Headquarters Collapses” — they’re clearly good enough on their own. But adding a sentence imbues the otherwise neutral titles with the narrator’s emotion. It’s the joy of Usopp bravely stepping up to take on the responsibility in a seemingly hopeless situation. It’s the poignant feeling of someone who’s been adrift at sea for half a century finally meeting the person they need to meet. The writers knew what was going to happen, but instead of telling us directly, they wrapped information in thin veil blankets, letting the audience to unravel them layer by layer as they watched. Before each episode, I only saw the title as an intriguing announcement. But when the episode ended, I looked back and gasped in admiration. Some titles even became better as I watched subsequent arcs and saw the consistency of the story.

Next up is Gintama. This series is eccentric, and so is its episode title. If you haven’t seen that episode, you’d never guess what it’s about based on the title.

Despite its quirky storytelling, Gintama isn’t a show you should watch with your brain off. The film is full of dialogues and actions meant to satirize someone or something. And those bizarre titles are like a code: sent to the viewer from the beginning of each episode, but only deciphered after watching it.

In the music scene, musicians are also proving to be quite adept at creating long titles.

Long, impactful, and apposite to the content – these kinds of titles give me a sense of joy every time I come across them. From them exudes a challenging attitude. In an era where everything has to be fast, concise, and convenient, where every product, both tangible and intangible, is eager to please customers, these titles go against the norm. They demand more time for reading and understanding, they make us asking questions and conducting research to find answers, they provide opportunities for us to reflect the life around.

Long or short, as long as it fits the story, it’s a good title. I don’t choose movies to watch, books to read, or music to listen to based on the number of words in the title. The content and the storytelling are what truly captivate me. But after being exposed to quite a lot of people’s creative works and having gone through the struggle with titles myself, I’ve come to understand the artistry of it. There are plenty of books with long titles, especially in the self-help genre. Isekai anime are also full of titles that sound like entire summaries of the series. I don’t know why these formats have become the standard, but the market is flooded with books and films with super long and similar names. I do like long titles, but the ones that capture the spirit of the works, not the one that simply list the main points.

A while ago, I watched a satirical video mocking Mark Manson, the author of the once-popular self-help book “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.” In the video, the creator pretends to be the author and introduces his upcoming books, with titles that are always long and increasingly absurd. Although I think the video is funny, I actually quite like Mark Manson’s title style: witty, creative, and full of attitude, not bland like many other self-help books. In this respect, I think the creator imitated him quite well. Some of his “parody” book titles interest me, and who knows, if I happen to come across them in a bookstore, I might even buy them!

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