Two that come to mind: Pet Sematary by Stephen King and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, both of which have a plot-specific meaning. Other examples?
Finnegans Wake.
Feersum Endjinn, by Iain M Banks, is spelled that way because a good part of the book is the diary of a young man who spells phonetically.
Maybe I am missing something but how is that misspelled?
This was a novel about cloning titled Joshua, son of None. The Joshua of the Bible was the son of a man named Nun. The character in the title had the full name of Joshua Francis Kellogg, heh, heh.
It should be Rainbow’s End.
(RIP, Vernor Vinge)
The book revolves around a retirement home named Rainbows End. A line from the book:
(He’d never been able to decide if that spelling was the work of an everyday illiterate or someone who really understood the place.)
“Ranbow’s End” is a location. “Rainbows end” is a statement.
Oh, okay, a perceived grammar, not a spelling error.
Inglourious Basterds (initially a film) has been novelised, so that counts, I suppose.
And The Pursuit of Happyness was a book before it was a film, so that definitely counts.
Reamde
An unreamdable book.
Goodreads has a list of 168 books with deliberately misspelled titles. I think all the books mentioned so far in this thread are on it.
Please forgive my ramblings in this post, but this has bothered me for ages and now I’m going to bother you with it:
The title of Stephen King’s, “‘Salem’s Lot,” has always seemed problematic to me — the titular town is called Jerusalem’s Lot (since, apparently, the 17th[?] century), so if you contraction it you’d have, “‘salem’s Lot,” which nobody would pronounce “SAY-lum’s” (more like “suh-LUM’s”). In addition, everyone who lives there or in the surrounding towns — like Castle Rock or Derry — calls it The Lot. Anyone taking an unfortunate detour would be looking for Jerusalem’s Lot on their map and if they asked for directions no one would say SAY-lum’s Lot (or “suh-LUM’s,” for that matter), they’d say The Lot’s gone bad! and fork the Evil Eye in their direction.
All that was to say this: I had some bad Lima beans for lunch and I’m rambling.
BTW, does anyone know of a town/city that does use that type of contraction, IRL? Appreciate it, ayuh.
Well known colloquialisms shouldn’t count (“them thar hills,” “whodunit”). I have spoken.
Does Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 count? I never could make up my mind whether the title was misspelled (miscounted?) or had a deeper meaning that eluded me. Was a great read nonetheless.
1Q84’s title references the novel Nineteen Eighty-four, a dystopian tale by George Orwell. Upon realizing that she has entered a universe parallel to her own, Aomame renames the year 1Q84, with Q representing a question mark. In Japanese the novel’s title is pronounced “1984,” as the characters Q and 9 are homonyms.
From:
It counts to me.
Yes, the reference to Orwell was evident, but I did not know that 9 and Q were homonymous in Japanese. Clever! I should have google’d it myself, thanks for the effort! Did Aomame state it like that in the novel itself, or did Murakami explain it somewhere else? The book is long and full of quirks, it may have escaped my attention. Or I may have forgotten it, I read it some time ago.
Japanese numbers are well suited for untranslatable wordplay.
The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey by Douglas Brinkley
Story of a professor taking a class out on the road for six weeks studying American art and culture.
From your link: Japanese 9, On’yomi reading: kyū, ku → Q, English: nain*
Lovely! But they don’t include 1Q84 in the examples under “Literature”. Nais! I mean: nice!
I like to hear you. 