Being Tori

We don’t know about you, but the modern pentathlon seems exhausting. Like, makes us want to sit down and take a nap just thinking about it. What is the pentathlon, you ask? We had to do some research as well. The modern pentathlon is actually meant to stimulate the diverse skills a 19^th century cavalry officer would require, including fencing, swimming, equestrian, running, and shooting. And all these events take place in one day (like we said, exhausting). It may not take us a full day to read the titles of today’s contenders but their titles are a mouthful, giving readers a pretty clear idea of the diverse range of topics to be found within their covers. —All Lit Up

In preparation for this post I did some soul searching. I do believe that the longest title belonging to a book I’ve read is:

The Girl With No Name: The True Story of a Girl Who Lived with Monkeys by Marina Chapman (fifteen words). A close second is The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (twelve words). Then we have From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg (ten words) in third place and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson (nine words) sliding into fourth.

But none of those are long enough to be impressive and/or entertaining enough for this post and I was disappointed. So, for posterity, I did some internetting to find the longest title I could. Winner, winner, chicken dinner, I found: Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn’t Quite Finish, so Maybe You Could Help Us Out, a collection of short stories by some friggen amazing writers (yeah, you’re reading that right: Nick Hornby, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Lemony Snicket!) edited by Eli Horowitz. It blows my winners out of the water at fifty-two words. FIFTY TWO. Looks like my To Be Read pile just grew by one.