I have a weakness for silly comedy; and it doesn't come much sillier than BBC Radio 4's Cabin Pressure. Set in the tiny world of a one plane charter airline, one of its running themes is the silly (that word again) games played by the aircrew to pass the time.
In the final episode of the current series (and here I come to the point of this post), their silly game was called "Books which sound more interesting with the final letter knocked off". So, for example, scattered through the half hour we were offered:
- John Steinbeck, Of mice and me
- Jerome K Jerome, Three men in a boa
- Thomas Hardy, Far from the madding crow
- Anthony Powell, A dance to the music of Tim
- Dan Brown, The da Vinci cod
You get the idea...
Knowing that I have a number of book lovers with excellent senses of humour among my visitors, I thought I would invite them ... you ... to play the game.
To set the ball rolling, here (with deleted letter in square brackets) are three contributions of my own:
- Margaret Atwood, Life before Ma [n]
- William Faulkner, The sound and the fur [y]
...and, perhaps less convincing...
- Anita Diament, The red ten [t]
Any takers?
3 comments:
This exercise appears to be flavour of the month. Similarly, the Guardian Books Blog's How misplaced letters could change the classics, postulated the typo of any one letter missing (rather than the rather limiting constraint of the last). I'm ray78 in the comments.
You know, this is really much easier if you subtract the last two letters.
Then you get
"Architects of Pea"
and the sequel
"Mother of Pea"
And of course, I have several versions of
"The Holy Bib"
I have Stephen King's complete series
"The Dark Tow"
Numerous other contributions have been moved from these comments to a later post: Lost in a good boo (2)
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