Near Misses

This bevy of books includes those never quite so successful as their classic cousins. Still, you might something readable here.

• A Confederacy of Dances (All the Dances against the Other One)
• A Kale of Two Cities (How Greens’ Farms can be Profitable)
• A Midsummer Night’s Scream (a Texas Heat Wave Tragedy)
• And Then There were Nine (Agatha Christie’s Baseball Tale)
• Chicken Slop for the Soul (101 Stories to Open the Palate and Rekindle the Stovetop)
• Grime and Punishment (a Warning Book for Dirty Children)
• Gulliver’s Gavels (After Lemuel became Judge of Several Remote Nations of the World)
• Hairy Potter; or, Why is there so much clay stuck to your arms?
• Hamwet (a Lispy Interpretation of Shakespeare)
• Less Miserables (Not as Many Miserable Ones as Usual)
• Little Mouse on the Prairie (Daring Days and Frightening Nights)
• Mess of the d’Urbervilles (the d’Urbervilles’ Lesser-Known Messy Daughter)
• Nine, Ten, Eighty-Four (a Quarterback’s Story)
• O, dip us the King! (a Tragic Drowning)
• One Hundred Fears of Solitude (a Pilgrim’s Guide to Loneliness)
• One Thousand and One Arabian Knights (Why Catholics Lost the Crusades)
• Rise and Fall of the Woman Empire (subtitle that, if you will!)
• Show Gun (a Gun Show Memoir)
• Tar Man (a Road Worker’s Memoir)
• The Bobbsey Twits (the never-ending tale of the silly Bobbsey family)
• The Bond Collector (How to know you have all the 007 movies)
• The Call of the Mild (To Be or Not to Be Gentle, that is the Question)
• The Diary of Anne. Frank! (Nothing Vague Here)
• The Old Man and the Pea (Unlucky Problems of the Elderly)
• The Purpose Driven Wife (a Husband’s Guide to Doing Household Repairs on Time)
• The Quotations From Chairman Mousy Tongue (Meeker than Uncle Mao )
• The Scrapes of Wrath (How the Depression rubbed people the wrong way)
• The Sound of the Baskervilles (a Dog-gone Good Musical)
• To Bill a Mockingbird (Veterinary Surgery for the Small and Famous)
• Zen and the Parts for Motorcycle Maintenance (An Inquiry into the Value of Keeping your Motorcycle Running)
• 20,000 Leaks Under the Sink (A Homeowner’s Plumbing Guide)