Book Title Anagrams

All the 'grams that're fit to print.

Quick note: I updated yesterday’s list of TV anagrams with more info about Cheaters the 2022 comedy, among other fixes.

In my collection of book titles, 2001 and 2010 are the books most closely related. As in the films, they’re part of the same series, and Arthur C, Clark continued it with 2063 and 3001. His is a brand of sci-fi we’ve mostly left behind, but its bustling optimism and confidence in human evolution can still be refreshing.

Thaïs is a tale of a pretentious religious hermit, Paphnutius, who’s trying to convert the lover of his youth, the libertine Thaïs, to Christianity for reasons not as pure as he likes to think. Tisha is the tale of Anne Hobbs, a teacher in the frontier town of Chicken, Alaska, whose early popularity with the locals fades after she befriends the natives and falls in love with one. Both are stories are forbidden love and attempts to educate, but otherwise, they’re pretty distinct.

Hamnet is a reimagining of William Shakespeare’s marriage and children, with the focus more on the family than Shakespeare himself. The title character, Shakespeare’s only son, will die at age eleven of the plague. The Man, published in 1964, imagined a Black president 44 years before we got one and a nakedly political impeachment trial 33 years before we got that. Both stories show deep roots in research, but Hamnet is a lot more fanciful in its language.

The title character in Gaston is the lovable idiot in a series of eponymous comics collections from France; there’s also a children’s book of the same name about a French bulldog accidentally placed amongst a family of poodles. Sontag is a Pulitzer-winning biography and examination of Susan Sontag’s life and work, and through her, what it means to be a modern American intellectual. It’s as different as night and day from either Gaston.

Transit is a novel that captures the experience of trying to travel during the 1940s—the boring details laced with unspoken anxiety. Anna Seghers, the author, is known for capturing “the moral experience of World War II.” Tristan is a medieval romance, stylishly told…if you’ve heard the tale of Tristan and Isolde elsewhere, it’s rarely better presented than here, even in translation.

The Statement is a political thriller, detailing a 70-year-old war criminal’s attempts to escape justice and others’ attempts to catch him, with the Catholic Church having served as the old criminal’s shelter up to this point. The Testament is another thriller about an international hunt for someone, for a different reason: an old multi-billionaire has named a mysterious new heir, and it’s up to disgraced corporate attorney Nate O’Riley to find her.

The Americans and The Rains Came are both about nations. The Americans is a trilogy of books on U.S. history that both reflected and shaped how we saw ourselves for generations. (It’s also the name of a noted photo-book by Robert Frank from 1958 that captured many then-present U.S. realities.) The Rains Came is a 1937 “novel of modern India” full of romantic and political drama, which inspired a film that won two of its six Oscar nominations.

Commonwealth is a 2016 epic about divorce, remarriage, and an interracial blended family that refuses to blend. The Common Law is a legal history book written by a man who’d become a Supreme Court justice, 21 years before he did. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was first to argue that “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”