Diagram Prize shortlist

[realthog]

The trade magazine The Bookseller has just announced the shortlist for this year's Diagram Prize, one of those UK literary awards that gets less attention over here than it should. The Beeb has the news:

• Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy L Cheney and Robert M Seyfarth

• Curbside Consultation of the Colon by Brooks D Cash

• The Large Sieve and its Applications by Emmanuel Kowalski

• Strip and Knit with Style by Mark Hordyszynski

• Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring by Lietai Yang

• The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais by Professor Philip M Parker

Comments

[saycestsay.livejournal.com]

You made those titles up.

Oh.

The whole point is weird titles? I think they succeeded.

(I suspect "The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais" was ghostwritten by Jay Lake jaylake and is actually dystopic urban fantasy.)

[realthog.livejournal.com]

To be honest, three of them seem perfectly sensible to me.

Baboon Metaphysics is presumably a study in animal psychology. If the authors do indeed make a case that baboons have metaphysics, then that's quite an important contribution -- and also, of course, yet another nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists.

The Large Sieve and its Applications. is, I would guess, about a technique in statistical analysis.

And Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring is a book you might want people to have read by the time you next step on an aeroplane.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Strip and Knit with Style might fit into the sensible category also.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

It might? Your personal habits never cease to amaze me, Fragano . . .

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I just know -- or have known -- a wide variety of people. It has caused me to reflect, among other things, that the most polite person I ever met had killed thirty-three people (or so I was informed at the time).

[time-shark.livejournal.com]

I vote for Curbside Consultation of the Colon.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"I vote for Curbside Consultation of the Colon."

Pervert!