The 2023 Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year shortlist is out and it's a doozy. As tradition demands, the winner is in your hands as the shortlist goes to a public vote on The Bookseller website here. The poll is open until 1st December with the winner revealed on the 8th.
Here's the short list, so make your vote count. Personally, I'm partial to any Monty Python inspired title.
The shortlist in full
The 12 Days of Christmas: The Outlaw Carol that Wouldn't Die by Harry Rand (McFarland & Co)
The author of Rumpelstiltskin's Secret: What Women Didn't Tell the Grimms looks at how a raucous drinking song became a festive favourite.
Backvalley Ferrets: A Rewilding of the Colorado Plateau by Lawrence Lenhart (University of Georgia Press)
The "beguiling weasel" at the centre of this book is "more than a charismatic minifauna; it is the covert ambassador of a critical ecosystem," says the author.
Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History by Matthew F Jordan (University of Virginia Press)
Charts the device's lifespan from "metallic shriek that first shocked pedestrians" to its use in the trenches in the First World War.
Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze by Tawny Lara (Quirk Books)
The only non-academic contender is a "judgement-free" handbook from a podcaster and self-described "sober sexpert".
I Fart in your General Direction: Flatulence in Popular Culture by Don H Corrigan (McFarland & Co)
"Covers every aspect of abdominal gas" in movies, music and TV, combined with "philosophical positions on colonic expression".
The Queerness of Water: Troubled Ecologies in the Eighteenth Century by Jeremy Chow (University of Virginia Press)
An interdisciplinary look at classic canonical works and how "sea, rivers, pools, streams and glaciers all participate in a violent decolonialism".
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