Books with titles taken from '60s songs

Just looking over my bookshelves, I find:
[ul]
[li]Are You Experienced? by William Sutcliffe.[/li][li]Beneath the Diamond Sky: Haight-Ashbury, 1965-1970 by Barney Hoskyns.[/li][li]Do You Believe in Magic?: Bringing the Sixties Back Home by Annie Gottlieb.[/li][li]I Me Mine by George Harrison.[/li][li]Just Like a Woman: How Gender Science Is Redefining What Makes Us Female by Dianne Hales. [/li][li]Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña by David Hajdu.[/li][li]Two Virgins by Kamala Markandaya.[/li][/ul]
If I can find this many offhand, imagine how many more there must exist.

The title of Wally Lamb’s “She’s Come Undun” comes from an old song by the Guess Who.

Well, Haruki Murakami wrote Dance, Dance, Dance and Norwegian Wood, both on my shelf next to Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby. :wink:

Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.

When I was in college, another person on the staff was interviewing someone who had written a book called “Venus In Spurs.” A couple of us tried to tell him that the title was a reference to the Velvet Underground song, “Venus In Furs,” but he wouldn’t believe us.

Rightly so, since the VU song itself was titled after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s book.

How about Deserted Cities of the Heart by Lewis Shiner?

I think David Crosby’s autobiography was titled Long Time Gone (title of one of his CSNY songs, natch). It figures that lots of biographies and autobiographies of '60s musicians will draw on the songs that they made famous.

Biffy, what song does “Deserted Cities of the Heart” refer to?

The phrase “beneath the diamond sky” comes from the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” which to me is still the greatest song ever of what the '60s were all about.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand wavin’ free

Quoted by Carl Sagan in one of his early popular astronomy books. Sagan was a total pothead, dude. Spark it!

The song “Deserted Cities of the Heart” is by Cream, from the album Wheels of Fire, and is also featured on the reunion concert DVD/CD sets coming out this week (yay!).

No books by or about rockers should count. They almost all have song references for titles. Publishers love familiar-sounding titles the way movie studios love sequels and remakes.

In science fiction, the first one that I know of is Hank Stine’s Season of the Witch in 1968. That title has become a favorite, with it or variations being used by Troy Taylor, Jean Marie Stine, James Leo Herlihy, Patricia Monaghan, Christopher Knight, Chip Martin, Mark Veum, Constance M. Burge, Bill Michaels, and about a million others.

Norman Spinrad followed with a collection of short stories called No Direction Home. George Alec Effinger also took the names of two of his Marid Audran novels from Dylan lyrics, When Gravity Fails and A Fire in the Sun. His Those Gentle Voices is supposed to be from a Moody Blues lyric.

So many sf stories have been named for rock titles and/or lyrics that I stopped noticing them years ago.

There’s also Paperback Writer by Mark Shipper, a novel about an alternate history version of the Beatles.

It seems to me that half the chapters in almost any recent autobiography are named after '60s songs.

OK, OK, but the weird part is that he simply refused to believe that there was even a song by that title, as if we would make it up.

Lots of good examples, Exapno, thanks. Back in the late '80s I read a pretentious article by Ziauddin Sardar in the MAAS International Journal of Islamic Science (published in India), presenting his philosophy of science in Islam. All the sections in the long article were headed with titles of Beatles songs. “We Can Work It Out” etc.

Ed McBain, who has a huge following in Sweden, titled one of his last books “Money, Money, Money.”