Yes, this is my 500th blog post. Streamers and balloons and candles and so forth.
It seems an appropriate time to put forward a little puzzler – can you think of book titles with numbers in them? Bonus points if that number is 500.
A few to kick us off:
The 39 Steps by John Buchan
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
84 Charing Cross Road
1984
Around the World in 80 Days
20,000 Leagues under the Sea
Slaughterhouse 5
Three Musketeers
I came up with those six before going to google (for only a few):
Note: Wasn’t that 39 Steps??
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubb
Tale of Two Cities
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1000 Places to See Before You Die (etc.)
Sorry about that! Not seeing your post when writing, I thought I remembered seeing 29 steps. Also, do numbers spelled out in words count. I started to not add those in, but did – and only included those found by googling if they were something I was familiar with.
Woot for your 500th post :) I just passed mine!
Congratulations!
500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington was one of my favourite books as a teenager. I must get round to reading it again, as it was really funny!
The Big Four – Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery – Agatha Christie
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – Agatha Christie
5 little pigs – Agatha Christie
The Sixth Lamentation – William Brodrick
The Fourth Bear – Jasper Fforde
1066 and all that
44 Scotland Street – Alexander McCall Smith
Three Cups of Tea
Quartet – Jean Rhys
The Third Man – Graham Greene
The Sixth Wife – Jean Plaidy
The Bookshop at 10 Curzon Street
The Two Towers – J.R.R. Tolkein
That’s all I can think of! No 500’s spring to mind. Congruatulations, I think I still have a birthday brownie or two, if you’d like them!
Doing well, guys!
And, yes, numbers spelt out as words count. They might even be better…
I’ll throw some more in.
Two People – AA Milne
4.50 From Paddington – Agatha Christie
101 Dalmations – Dodie Smith
Congratulations, Simon!
“Instances of the Number 3” by Sally Vickers.
5 Children and It
Nineteen Eighty Four
84 Charing Cross Road
Five on a Treasure Island
Five Go to Mystery Moor
(and all the other EB Famous Five books)
The Secret Seven
Secret Seven Adventure
(and all the other EB Secret Seven books)
Now We Are Six
2001 A Space Odyssey
And Then There were None (does zero count?)
Seven Dials Mystery
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Three Men in A Boat
This is addictive – I must stop thinking about this and go and do something exciting like ironing or washing.
Five Have Plenty of Fun…
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Sign of Four
Three Men in a Boat
Three Sisters
1984
Nineteen minutes
Nineteenth Wife
One Good Turn
Four Quartets
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Five Children and It
(All of the Famous Five books)
(All of the Secret Seven books)
Around the World in 80 days
One Thousand and One Arabian Nights
What the Bible & Shakespeare:
Numbers
12th Night
Henry IV Part 1 etc
Three Singles to Adventure
One Corpse too Many
One Pair of Feet
One Pair of Hands
Three Men on A Plane
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
Six characters In Search of An Author
Three Blondes (eek where did that book come from?)
Three Men on the Bummel
The Nine Tailors, Dorothy Sayers
The Three Clerks, Anthony Trollope
The Fifth Queen, Ford Madox Ford
At least, those are the only ones I could find on my shelves that hadn’t already been mentioned!
Karen
Everything I can think of has been posted already, I will ponder on, meanwhile, many congratulations and thanks for your blog, it never fails to cheer and illuminate.
Simon, I so love your blog! I am a fellow Bensonophile and did a recent post you might enjoy…
http://abloomsburylife.blogspot.com/2009/03/real-housewives-of-riseholme-and.html
Cheers!
The 3000 Mile Garden
13 by Sebastien Beaumont
Sixpence House
The Twelve and the Genii
Half way to Venus (is half a number??)
The Three of Us
Thre Day Road
1000 Nights in Venice
One Pair of Hands
The Seven Sisters
26A
Four Dreamers and Emily
And Now on Radio 4…
Love and Louis X1V
31 Songs
Two Caravans
Three Times Table
At Swim Two Boys
1974
One Fine day
1599
A Thousand Acres
One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch
1921
Instances of the Number 3
The Power of Three
Sorry, some of these may already have been listed,
Carol
Here’s a few more!!!
Child 44
The 19th Wife
8th Confession
1481: The year china invented the world
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
The Four Loves
Happy 500th–that’s quite an accomplishment! I think everyone’s taken all the good titles with numbers in them (meaning I’m too lazy to think of more!). Here’s to the next 500! :)
One corpse too many
The animals went in two by two
Three men in a boat
The sign of four
Five share a packet of crisps (unpublished)
The sixth wife
The Seven Dials Mystery
Henry XIIIth
The nine taylors
Ten little indians
The history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters.
All for now
Butterfield 8 (John O’Hara)
Ooh I love lists:
Pistols for Two – Georgette Heyer
The Secret of Platform 13 – Eva Ibbotson
Third Girl – Agatha Christie
A Tale of Two Cities – Dickens
The Three Clerks – A Trollope
The Three Sisters -May Sinclair
One Fine Day – Mollie Panter Downes
and three of the Melendy series by Elizabeth Enright:
The Four Storey Mistake
Then there were Five
Spiderweb for Two
The Thirteenth Tale
A Pair of Blue Eyes (am I allowed this?)
Five Boys
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
Goldilocks & the Three Bears
Three Billy Goats Gruff
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Seven years in Tibet
I shall drive myself mad thinking about this all day!
I thought of a few more:
A Thousand Spendid Suns
A Million Little Peices
Sixty Stories (Donald Barthelme)
Twelfth Night
Now we are Sixty
500! Woot!!
The Crying of Lot 49
But no crying about your 500 post achievement.