Book titles! They’re important, and the best of them can be quite memorable.

Some titles say a lot about what’s in the novels, as do War and Peace and Crime and Punishment in summarizing Leo Tolstoy’s and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s respective masterpieces. Others tease you with their intriguing nature (many examples a few paragraphs below).

Titles can be funny, serious, long, short, evocative, descriptive, clever, slangy, punny, and more. They can be drawn from unforgettable phrases in the earlier works of other authors. They can just be the name of a place (as with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Henry James’ Washington Square, and many of James Michener’s novels). Or they can include the year in which the novel is set (witness George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Or the name of the protagonist, or a description of the…