Talk:List of fictional books

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Archive 1 Mar 2005 - Nov 2006

Contents

[edit] Gene Wolfe

Removed a bunch of what appear to be really fictional books (in the sense that somebody made 'em up) from the Gene Wolfe section. If you have citations for these, let me know and I'll put them back, but I couldn't find any proof that Wolfe wrote any of the ones I removed. --Bookgrrl 02:04, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Fictional books whose titles are the same as those of the books they're in

The Times Literary Supplement's NB column has recently been compiling a list of fictional books that meet the above description. The last time I looked it the "Complete Metafictional Catalogue", as they call it, was as follows:

To which could be added the Hitchhiker's Guide and a lot of Borges's oeuvre. Might it be a good idea to have a seperate section of the list for these kinds of books?

Also, can untitled fictional books be included in this list? I'm thinking in particular of the master's Pontius Pilate novel in The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. [talk to the] HAM 20:11, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I'd vote for not including untitled works, because how would you list it? "Untitled book by Master" ? Also, then we'd have to deal with every book in which some character is said to be writing a novel or have written a novel. I think that might be too tenuous an inclusion. In fact, I'm wondering whether we should tighten the inclusion criteria (see next comment)... --Bookgrrl 23:25, 30 December 2006 (UTC)
But then you have to consider the book from Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is never named but it is very important to the novel overall. Perhaps untitled books should only be added when they are important to the book. Tartan 16:41, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

To which could also be added the (several different) If On a Winter's Night a Traveller... books in the novel of the same name by Italo Calvino... Thomasshea 14:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inclusion Criteria

Anyone think that we should tighten the inclusion criteria and narrow this list down a little to only fictional books that are important to the work in which they appear? I'm thinking something like: "This list includes fictional books whose importance to the actual work in which they appear is such that, if the fictional work were removed, it would substantially negatively impact the actual work." Based on this, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be included because without the fictional Guide, the main characters in the actual book wouldn't be able to get around. Susanna Clarke's footnoted fictional biographies and histories would be included because they add substantially to the realism of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. However, Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver books wouldn't, because those books don't have any direct bearing on the actual book(s) in which they appear. Mostly I'm considering this because the list is so damn long :) Thoughts? --Bookgrrl 23:24, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

I personally don't like the idea of taking out the titles mentioned only in passing, partly because they are part of the richness of the books in which they appear (imagine Hitchhiker's without Oolon Colluphid), partly because we risk losing whole categories of fictional books and the reasons for them as discussed in the intro, and partly because many of these are just too much fun to read, and the list would be less entertaining and less informative without them. Something I've noticed that User:Random Critic does with the List of fictional planets, which has similar issues, is spin off large sections into separate lists, leaving behind a list of related lists. For our purposes that would mean separate lists for Jasper Fforde, Frank Herbert, Francois Rabelais, Kurt Vonnegut and probably several others, particularly authors for whom it's a major motif and there is something to be said about the purposes they serve in that particular author's work, or in which the fictional work itself is notable enough to sustain aparagraph about it.
As for your inclusion criteria paragraph, it's probably a good idea but I'd like to suggest using the triple ' for emphasis rather than having words in ALL CAPS.
Another thought on inclusion criteria. I started to type in It Was a Dark a Stormy Night by Snoopy last night, and then stopped because it was published, although I'm pretty sure the strips about its writing were also part of the book. I guess that makes it a metabook or something. Would it be fair to say that Farmer's Venus on the Half Shell, ostensibly by Kilgore Trout, is not a fictional book because it exists, but the book of the same title as mentioned in Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions is indeed a fictional book? The mind boggles. Karen | Talk | contribs 00:28, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, I know, I hate to lose any -- being both a bibliomaniac and an inclusionist :) On the other hand, I would love to get this to Featured List status. Although the responses to my Peer Review were, to say the least, marginally useful at best given that several people didn't bother to read closely enough to find out what the list was actually OF, there did seem to be a consensus that it was too long and unwieldy... We could as you say spin off some of the longer lists, and perhaps that's the right way to do it. They might actually get more attention with their author's name in the article title, e.g. "List of Fictional Books in the Oeuvre of Jorge Luis Borges." Guess we'll see if anyone else weighs in...(oh and I'll fix the ALL CAPS...) --24.58.247.216 01:48, 31 December 2006 (UTC) oops, forgot to sign in...--Bookgrrl 01:49, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't like the idea of removing the passing-mention titles (I too am a bibliomaniac, and fictional item list-aholic). They don't always add a lot to the books they are mentioned in, but their (non-)existance does add something. That and I love being able to see them all here. :) Tartan 16:47, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I am strongly opposed to removing any books from the list. The value of a thing like this is its inclusivity. I think there's far too much concern over the prestige of having a "featured list" (I think this is true of Wikipedia, as a whole). It's more important we provide the most complete resource possible.--Visionthing 22:46, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rating system?

We seem to have a consensus in favor of inclusivity, i.e. we don't want to try to limit which fictional books ought to be listed here. However, I'm pondering the value of rating the books in some manner. For example by (1) critical to the surrounding story (2) incidental to the surrounding story (3) totally irrelevant to the surrounding story. So The Hitchhiker's Guide, or some of Borges', would be ranked 1 since the entire story is sort of built around them, while Agatha Christie's Ariadne Oliver books would be ranked 3 since it's important she's an author but the actual books aren't important per se...This could be done in a table format, for example:

Fictional Books
Book Author Ranking Appears in Created by
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy various contributors 1 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Affair of the Second Goldfish Ariadne Oliver 3 xx Agatha Christie
A Child's History of the Raven King John Waterbury, Lord Portishead 2 Jonathan Strange and Professor Norell Susanna Clarke

If we did this, we could then sort the books either by real-world author, as it is now, or by the fictional book's title (might be interesting), or by rank, etc. It would be a godawfully long table but it might help structure things a bit more, plus provide some information on how critical the fictional work is to its surrounding real-world work. Thoughts on this? --Bookgrrl holler/looksee 17:37, 17 January 2007 (UTC)

Right off the bat, I can see #2 being hard to codify, and it seems to me that people are more likely to look something up by author than by other criteria. Still, I'm very much in favor of some system of including info about the fictional book's function. Rather than a numerical ranking, I'd like to see something a little more categorical that fits in with the intro, e.g. major plot element, background detail, joke title. etc. Perhaps we can think about this a big more and figure something out? Karen | Talk | contribs 01:09, 22 January 2007 (UTC)
Yes, let's -- I'd really like to do something to enhance the value of this. It's a fun list as it stands just as trivia, sort of; it would be better with some added analysis. I shall ponder...let me know if you come up with anything :) Bookgrrl holler/lookee here 16:36, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Real book removed

Thanks go to user 4.233.140.46 (talk • contribs), who pointed out that

Peculiarities of American Cities [...] is a genuine book by Willard Glazier, who was an American Civil War Veteran and a prolific author in the late 18th Century.
(Noted by a Bellairs reader, J. Van Brunt)

I've just removed the item from the article. The book was reprinted only last month(!): ISBN 1-4290-0453-3. Cheers, CWC(talk) 12:53, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gene Wolfe

I was involved in submitting the Gene Wolfe entry to the late lamented Invisible Library. I haven't read Bibliomen myself, but I absolutely trust the people on the Urth List who compled the entries for it, so I'm sure all those titles belong here.

Don't we want to link all authors' names and everything we can?

I'm delighted that this article exists now that the Invisible Library is no more! —JerryFriedman 23:58, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wikilinks, citations, details, and consistency

I've made a start on wikilinking real book titles, on the theory that if a fictional book is notable enough to mention, it comes from a real book notable enough to have an article. The wikilink helps to establish that we're citing the fictional titles from real books, and should inspire people to write entries on the redlinked titles. It would also be good to wikilink articles about important characters.

There's also a question of consistency, and what to do about authors with just two fictional titles. I gave L'Engle a section for her two titles, because the misc. from literature section is very long and disorganized, and we should break out anyone we can. At some point, without my noticing, someone moved her titles back into the catch-all, and deleted the info a. We should have more details on the functions of the fictional books, not fewer. I'm going to put it back, and I'd appreciate it if it were left that way, at least until we settle on a system for coding the titles in terms of importance to the real work. I may be able to find a third title for L'Engle; we'll see. Similarly, I think if a real book (or fictional author, for subheadings organized that way) has more than one fictional title, they should be broken out that way. And people should pay attention to where things are listed. I just took the Professor Challenger fictional books out of the Sherlock Holmes section...again. They are definitely not part of the Holmes canon!

On the ongoing gripes about referencing - I think we should probably add ISBN numbers for the real books recent enough to have them, publication dates, and cites for any scholarship we can find that mentions the fictional books of individual authors. I'm sure there is material for Borges, and possibly Tolkien and Vonnegut, at the very least. Speaking of Borges, his section probably needs to be organized by source, but I don't know enough about his work to do it! Karen | Talk | contribs 04:14, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I can tell you how your edits got reverted: this edit on 5 March by JerryFriedman. The edit summary says "fixing Gene Wolfe", and I'm not sure what he meant to do, but what he did, in fact, was revert weeks of changes to the article: dozens of additions, subtractions, and corrections--more than I care to count. I think, frankly, that the article ought to be reverted to version 112935133 although this would mean also reverting all the edits you've made in the past day. But redoing your edits would be much easier than undoing line-by-line all the damage done by Jerry's edit. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 07:05, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Aha! That explains a lot! (So much for trusting too heavily to edit summaries.) Perhaps we should work from the revision you mention. My edits can be redone as needed. Karen | Talk | contribs 08:13, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
So would you like to revert? I'd go ahead and do it, but I hate to revert someone else's good edits--and I thought you might want, before a revert, to make some notes of what you'd done so far so it would be easier to duplicate after. In other words: "After you, my dear Alphonse." --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 16:26, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry. I'm working on fixing it right now. —JerryFriedman 18:10, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I think it's fixed, though people who edited recently might want to check the sections they edited. I'm really sorry, and I have no idea how it happened. —JerryFriedman 19:10, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
It looks much better now. Thanks! We should all proofread, though, on general principle. Karen | Talk | contribs 02:45, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Spin-off articles?

I see that the article is now long enough to generate the advisory that it may be preferable to break into additional articles. Based strictly on length, I think we should have separate list articles for A. S. Byatt, Susanna Clarke, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jasper Fforde, Frank Herbert, Stephen King, Francois Rabelais, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jack Vance, Kurt Vonnegut, and Gene Wolfe. Most of these authors are important enough to establish notability for such a list, it would make this article more manageable, and the individual authors' (and novels') articles could have a See Also for the spin-offs. (It wouldn't be a bad idea to spin off Adams and Tolkien too, and perhaps a few others, because although their lists aren't terribly long, they're well-known writers whose fictional works are a significant part of their actual ones.) It's also probably time to have List of fictional books from comics as a separate article. Is that okay with everyone? Karen | Talk | contribs 06:28, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I kind of like having it all together, but if the article's considered too long, breaking it up the way you suggest is definitely the way to do it. —JerryFriedman 23:17, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Typos?

Is "Wjo" (Danielewski) really "correvt", or should it be "Who"? How about "La Lorna" (Kiernan)—should that be "La Llorona"? —JerryFriedman 19:06, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

I checked the Danielewski one, and it was indeed a typo. Trying to check the Kiernan one made me wish the titles were given. I can tell you "La Lorna" is not in Threshold, Murder of Angels, Low Red Moon, or Silk (the ones that are searchable at Amazon).
Yes, it should be "La Llorona." My mistake.--Visionthing 14:45, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
New question: The Edinburgh Review and The Gentleman's Magazine (under Suzannah Clarke) were real and highly successsful periodicals. Should they be deleted, or is the theory that the issues with articles on magic were fictional? My feeling is that they should be deleted. —JerryFriedman 22:32, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
I'm with you on the Clarke items: The publications—as listed, with no specific issue cited—are not fictional. Ditto The Newgate Calendar and The Malefactor's Register (the latter—The Malefactor's Bloody Register, to be more precise—is just another name for the former). --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 22:43, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] R Fergus McGhee

I removed the section "Works invented by R Fergus McGhee" because he is apparently a teenager with a single subsidy-published book. I don't think he, or his work, is sufficiently noteworthy for inclusion on this list. --ShelfSkewed [Talk] 03:22, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

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