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06 April 2006
Where is your name in literature? For example, I'm reading Dan Fante right now, and one of the characters has my last name (a fairly uncommon one). What books have characters with your name?
One time in a thrift shop I found a novel called Bethany by a writer named Anita Mason. I bought it for the heck of it. It turned out to be a incredibly disturbing story of an experiment in communal living. Nowhere in the novel does it say "Bethany" means "house of poverty", but I bet the author knew it.
On a semirelated note: I have a fairly uncommon last name, and have just started working for a very large, global corporation. In the entire corporate structure, there is only 1 other person with my last name... and they work in the same town I do. Even though I've never met anyone in this STATE with my last name.
I have a very uncommon last name too, but if you look it up on Amazon some of my Dad's academic papers come up. I'm not sure why, they're not available to purchase.
My last name is quite rare too. I've never run across it in fiction, but I just found out that at my college (mind you, a college with a mere 1200 undergrads) there's another girl with the same first and last name as me.
It's quite distressing. I'm glad I already graduated.
My last name's unusual, but Garrison Kiellor has a tiny one-off character in "Lake Wobegon Days" with the name. He's a raving crazy lunatic who thinks the Canadians are going to attack colonial Minnesota, if I remember rightly.
My last name's unusual, but Garrison Kiellor has a tiny one-off character in "Lake Wobegon Days" with the name. He's a raving crazy lunatic who thinks the Canadians are going to attack colonial Minnesota, if I remember rightly.
Huh. Thanks amro - I don't vanity search for my name but after reading your post I searched for myself on pubmed and just found out that I'm an author on a paper for (some extremely minor) work I did... five or six years ago.
Pride & Prejudice (although I spell it with two T's at the end). I used to have an english teacher who insisted on calling me "Elizabeth" constantly (not knowing that it's actually my middle name).
I've never met anyone in this STATE with my last name.
I've never met anyone in this country with mine. (I'm in the United States; my parents and brother are in Canada.) This is particularly odd because our name is European and easy to pronounce.
If you search, you'll get pages and pages of my dad, some of me, maybe one entry for my brother, and a tiny handful of people we're vaguely related to in Italy, Poland, and Brazil.
My last name is incredibly common, the equivalent of Smith, and my first is not uncommon either, and yet and yet, i'm yet to see it in a book. Or maybe I dont read enough Indian Writing In English.
My name is only shared by my brother, father, uncle, 2 cousins and a nephew. That's it. I know this. It's on a bunch of academic papers and reports and stuff, as we're fairly academic people.
There is a woman with my (married) name who is, apparently, fascinated with Faulkner and writes books about him. She even has a Wiki article about her.
Then there's the Biblical Deborah - a judge, military leader and prophetess.
When in San Antonio I worked with a woman with the same name as me (my maiden name, her married name). We frequently received each other's inter-office mail and a couple phone calls as well.
My last name, Pooley, shows up in the Anthony Trollope novel Marion Fay as a place name, which made me very very happy because I adore Anthony Trollope novels.
My sister sent me this strange book called The Revenge of Private Pooley, which I haven't read yet but is fun to have on my bookshelf.
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