Recently I've found myself musing on the title of a book I read many years ago, certainly more than ten years ago: University Ghost Story by Nick DiMartino.
To be pedantic, I didn't actually read it. I listened to it on MP3 Player. I was going through a phase of listening to audio-books at this time. It never really stuck, but I have a few warm memories of the practice.
Ridiculous as it sounds, I can't remember whether University Ghost Story was a good book or a bad book. I can't even remember the plot.
But I like the title very much! It's so simple, and strangely audacious. I remember wondering how nobody had ever called a novel University Ghost Story before.
I've worked in a university for my entire working career-- twenty-five years on the fifteenth of October (on the same date that, by coincidence, this blog will be fifteen years old). I love the atmosphere of universities but it's a constant struggle to appreciate it, for it not to become invisible to me.
Some titles never cease to enchant me, like (as I've mentioned many times before) The Winter's Tale. They seem to have a concentrated sort of existence. A good piece of fiction draws on broad human experience, a particular aspect or territory of existence; it's already a concentration; and the title is a concentration of that.
" I can't remember whether UNIVERSITY GHOST STORY was a good book..."
ReplyDeleteMight be an argument against MP3, or more precisely for actually reading
Well, it might be for someone else, but I've also read plenty of print books that I can't remember at all! Including Middlemarch by George Eliot and The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
DeleteStraining my memory, I seem to remember it at least wasn't terrible.
I think Middlemarch is forgettable. Obviously it's one of those things that becomes popular at intervals of time. In her obsession at snobby maturity ' Elliott ' made characters that in the end were less believable than the Dickens ' comic turns.
ReplyDeleteBut I did love the sad solemnity of Age of Innocence