The Joy of X: When Your Alphabet Reading Challenge Gets Serious
Don't panic, alphabet challengers. We'll always have Xanadu.
Anyone who takes part in an alphabet reading challenge will, sooner or later, find themselves needing that most elusive of letters: X. And may say to themselves, Hmm. And, Now what?. And, Maybe I could just read all seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu instead.
What book titles begin with X? Almost no words, in English at least, begin with X. Even Sue Grafton, author of the Alphabet Mysteries series (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, etc.), gave up when she reached the twenty-fourth character of our alphabet. The title in Grafton's series that represents the letter X is, simply, X.
Any letter that nets you a high score in Scrabble is hard to complete in an alphabet challenge. Last spring saw me running from the children's section of a large second-hand bookshop, waving a Puffin paperback and crying, 'I've found a Y!'. I'm still haunted by the time I gave a Z unread to the charity shop, thinking I would never need it. Luckily, I'm a history fan, so queens keep me in Qs. But even these tricky letters are abundant compared with X.
X stands for so few actual words that we use it to represent an unknown quality: not a thing, but a placeholder. Even X's homophone, Z, which is relatively rare, manages to boast some general-purpose nouns like zoo and zero. What does X have? Xylophone, ubiquitous in children's alphabet books but hardly in everyday life, and xenophobia. A good number of book titles that do begin with X, like Grafton's, feature the letter itself rather than a word beginning with the letter. For example, The X Factor or X Marks the Spot.
If everyday language lacks exes, proper names are a richer resource. X is, well, exotic, which is where Xanadu comes in. There are multiple books across different genres titled Xanadu or Xanadu Something. (I have three.) Kubla Khan knew what he was doing when he decreed that stately pleasure dome. X is also pleasingly alien (or, should I say, xenoanthropological), and science fiction accordingly furnishes titles like Xiccarph and Xorandor. Back in the mythology of our own Earth, we could also pay a visit to the Mayan underworld, Xibalba. In personal names, Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, rates the odd title, as do fellow Greeks Xenophon and Xenophanes and the Persian king Xerxes. Eponymous studs of romance fiction include at least one Xavier.
Obscure, yes, but the appeal of the alphabet challenge lies precisely in hunting down these rare letters. I did my first challenge after listing my books alphabetically by title and noticing that some letters were barely represented in the list. I was immediately curious how hard it would be to fill the gaps. Despite an alphabet challenge being essentially arbitrary, it can lead you to books you never knew existed. In the realm of X, despite how few titles there are, there are more than you might imagine and on a wider range of subjects than you might think.
The alphabet challenge also offers a goal seldom attained by book addicts: completion. You can't read everything you want to read during one lifetime. But you can, in theory, collect every book in English beginning with X. Got to have meaningful goals, right?
For those who believe they've exhausted the possibilities of X, there are helpful lists of X titles online at LibraryThing and Goodreads. And a suggestion to authors: by giving your next book a title beginning with X, you can not only stand out from the crowd but be assured of a small but dedicated readership. It might be hard, but your creative genius will come up with something. And it doesn't have to be about Xanadu.
