Listling Without Commentary: Readers’ Descriptions Of Long-Lost Books From Whatsthatbook.com

whatsthatbook.com

Ever struggle to recall the name of a book you read and perhaps even loved? Annoyed that none of your friends can remember what the title is of that book about the Japanese guy looking for his missing wife that involves a weird teenage girl and maybe a well or a parallel universe or something?

On whatsthatbook.com, passionate readers can crowdsource figuring out “what the hell the book was called.” It’s a brilliant concept for a website. Unfortunately many readers never get the answers they seek and sometimes what’s more shocking is those that do, such as “Girl’s step-mom drinking her period blood” (“Innocence” by Jane Mendelsohn) and “book from 70s/80s, girl named Laura, goes to Catskills for summer with parents, comes back to NY alone, gets drunk and gets in trouble, sees Woody Allen” (“The Rise and Fall of a Teenage Wacko” by Mary Anderson). There are a lot of people out there looking for a book about a teenager who falls in love with a ghost, sidenote.

Below we have listed the subject lines from 40 of the nearly 5,000 posts created by users of the whatsthatbook Fiction Forum.

40 Book Descriptions From What’s That Book Dot Com:

1. wealthy southern family who got rich with early airconditioning w/ fat heroine who gardens

2. woman electrecutes overbearing mother in law via the lawnmower

3. Narrated by cat in small village, maybe English, dog kills evil nurse

4. Looking for a book about a biracial girl who goes with her mother and friend to a lesbian beach

5. burned girl lives by cemetary talks to dead, dead have jobs, one is a baby that always cries

6. girl killed in car wreck father puts her brain in a gorilla’s

7. girl goes on a ship. has lice. whips an old man. and finds out many crew secrets

8. lonely girl experiments with male and female lovers before being attacked by her stalker on the final page

9. A couple who doesn’t want kids, he then does, she doesn’t, they fight break up, she then finds out she is pregnant, she goes to abort, she can’t do it, they live happy.

10. a girl visits her grandma and meets an immigrant clown

11. French Nuns in Middle Ages Go Insane, Supposedly Based on Real Events

12. A book where people don’t want to grow up and eventually they kill themselves?

13. Single mum starts a relationship with a clown/balloon animal maker who lives on a canal boat

14. Historical Romance two women travel west (california?) to become brides

15. skinny attractive wealthy woman w short bob – in Hong Kong + lots of parties + bombing

16. Young adult/kid’s, 1990’s – people with huge teeth, heads rest on carts

17. A woman is raised by wolves becomes wild, one baby she has dies and she eats the baby like she saw her wolf mother do

18. A man who didn’t like dogs who grew to love a dog

19. two children walk to school, one gets hit by car

20. Woman jogging finds dead baby, baby had bad disease, set in small town, ends up pregnant at end of book

21. FAERY KILLER, girl moves into new place and neighbour is weird big guy who is a sculptor, turns out he is murdering faeries for sculptures

22. underwater team discovers between plates of ocean floor a perfect society that can recycle souls

23. Girl gets off of train to get brother a donut and train takes off

24. Book from 2000-present, about a girl and a polar bear NOT NORTHERN LIGHTS

25. Boy’s parents buy him a realistic red-headed robot girlfriend.

26. Book about a girl who lives with her grandmother at the sea side. They eat slugs.

27.  Niki is Olympic diver then tobacco farmer then campaigns against cigarette companies

28. an ex-Texas Ranger private eye who is adept in judo and plays bridge at master level

29. mix- up at sperm bank, soilder donor meets fullfigured pregnant woman, she throws up

30. Read in early 90s, woman works in corporate world, dies, and wakes up in hell.

31. crime story about some bad guys victimized by a cannibalistic hermit

32. Book about apple orchards and brainwashing. 1997.

33. Two boys grow up together, father gets shot, kittens drown, homosexual relationship

34. Read late 80s-Boarding school (?) Evil girls, laxatives, fancy red dress

35. Book about man that lures children to house of pleasure and then they can’t leave, house is alive

36. written around 1950’s with main character running in a cabbage patch wearing a diaper at end of novel

37. romance: girl has to do hard labor in fields, sold nude on auction block, then finds love

38. a guy who time travels by jumping over a pit with a bear running around it to an island and theres a plane and a witch?????

39. Book about Muffin and a goth girl?

40. fiction book about wolves- no human interaction though


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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in California. Her work has appeared in nine books including "The Bigger the Better The Tighter The Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image & Other Hazards Of Being Female," magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3075 articles for us.

83 Comments

  1. 38 is Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. Actually really good (as always, buy it used cause he’s a homophobic jerk in real life).

    is 7 the True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle? I haven’t read it since like, middle school, but I think she cuts off all her hair at some point, so…lice?

    • 38. Baba Yaga was that bitch…Enchantment was a great book

      Fuck Orson Scott Card, seriously. How can someone so creative be so backwards?
      Don’t even buy it used, borrow the book and support your local library.

      • AMEN. That’s a good thought.

        But if you do like Card, I think it’s one of his best novels. Also if you like Russian/Ukrainian history. And fairy tales. I like all of those things. Except his politics and the fact that if I buy his books the proceeds might go to NOM.

          • If you like his books don’t read Folk of the Fringe, cause it’s fucking insulting and the only book I think I’ve ever thrown away. Also Marika, good call on The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, I could totally see that being what they’re thinking of.

    • Oh my god I was just thinking of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle the other day! This is so weird haha, I never thought anyone else had ever read that. I loved that book. I read it over and over. I DON’T KNOW WHY.

      • What do you mean you don’t know why? The high seas! Mutiny! Strong teenage female protagonist! And Avi, master of the YA twist ending. It had everything!

        (Obviously, I also loved it, and kind of want to find a copy now.)

        • OMG! i forgot id even read this! Charlotte Doye got FRONTPAGE on the scholastic book fair flyers so i HAD to buy it. i dont remember anthing but her hair flapping in the seabreeze. That, combined w Avi’s lack of last name, reminded me of Fabio. These are my only feelings.

          And #28 sounds like The Autobiography of Chuck Norris

        • Haha I mean I’d totally forgotten what it was mostly about, and also the cover makes it seem so silly now. I kind of want to read it again though… My parents have it somewhere, with all my old books… :B

  2. Most of these sound more like my dreams/nightmares than books…

    35. is definitely “The Thief of Always” by Clive Barker, and I think I read the book about the girl whose boyfriend is a ghost (possibly a whole series of them?) A couple others seem familiar too.

  3. SCORE. found the book about the kid who gets these really rad shoes that he wanted for his birthday, but then they sucked, and he broke his tv throwing the sucky shoe at it. been trying to track that down for a while (i don’t know why, by the way). only took like 30 seconds on that site.

  4. For some reason, I’m convinced 40 might be The Sight by David Clement-Davies, despite the fact that ‘fiction book about wolves’ could describe literally half a library’s worth of books.

  5. #5–the ‘dead have jobs’ part reminds me of Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. But I don’t think the other stuff happened so I’m probably wrong or the person is wrong or whatever. Anyway I like that book. You die and age backwards and return to earth as a baby via riverwickerbabybasket. I think Elvis was in this book?

  6. 17. A woman is raised by wolves becomes wild, one baby she has dies and she eats the baby like she saw her wolf mother do

    “Fang” or “Fangs”…I remember the story pretty vividly. She ends up with a whole brood of feral inbred children she produces with a vagabond murderer.

    It’s a book you stumble across in a used book store and never see again.

  7. This isn’t a book, but does anyone remember a video of two girls having sex and one was reading a book (I want to say something by Fitzgerald) out loud? I think I saw it through this site and it was SO AWESOME and I’ve been trying to find it for months. I love you, Autostraddlers.

  8. Pingback: Parting is Such Sassy Sorrow | adventuresundays

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