Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles That Sound Like They Could Be Crayola Crayon Colours

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish in June of 2010 and was moved to That Artsy Reader Girl in January of 2018. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together.

Previous Top Ten Tuesday Topics

March 9: Spring Cleaning Freebie
March 16: Books On My Spring TBR
March 23: Books With Funny Titles
March 30: Places in Books I’d Like To Live
April 6: Books I’d Gladly Throw Into The Ocean…

This is a great, fun post.

And as a self confessed stationary nerd – surely the highlight of each year is the August order of new stationary and notebooks for work! – this is just joyous fun!

And I mean look at some of the names that crayola came up with!

Fiery Rose	Sizzling Sunset	Heat Wave	Lemon Glacier
Spring Frost	Absolute Zero	Winter Sky	Frostbite
Sizzling Red	Red Salsa	Tart Orange	Orange Soda
Bright Yellow	Yellow Sunshine	Slimy Green	Green Lizard
Denim Blue	Blue Jeans	Plump Purple	Purple Plum
Sweet Brown	Brown Sugar	Eerie Black	Black Shadows

And there is a list here of the best crayola colour names at which you can add your vote if you feel like it!

Currently the top five are

Purple Mountains Majesty
Magic Mint
Robin’s Egg Blue
Tickle Me Pink
Razmatazz

Anyway!

Moving to books, let’s have a look at the possible titles that might make a good colour name.

Burnt Sugar, Avni Doshi

A dark brown colour, a few shades deeper than caramel or coffee; perhaps akin to what is now named Fuzzy Wuzzy… oh my, that sounds like a problematic name, Crayola!

Concrete Rose, Angie Thomas

We are definitely in the pinks here from the rose, but a darker greyer shade… This is currently called Off Road.

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

This feels like a rather literal and prosaic name, but what could be more evocative of the deep green of a pine forest?

I do find the contrast between the green below and the red of the book cover somehow deeply unsettling.

Pine by Francine Toon could have been another contender but that seemed a little too literal.

Stardust, Neil Gaiman

Stardust for me evokes a sparkling silver colour, full of life and energy which is a little tricky to recreate in the pallete available to either a child with crayons or WordPress.

Perhaps the Crayons with Glitter collection Quick Silver colour which marries the blue of the night sky with the silver of the stardust

Crayon Colour

Glitter

Miss Benson’s Beetle, Rachel Joyce

Despite the prominent golden yellow on the cover of the book, beetles remind me of iridescent blues and greens, so again perhaps the Crayon with Glitter range will help.

Crayon colour

Glitter

What we are trying to recreate is this image of a tansy beetle

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

This is an easy colour to pick again: it is the colour of the book cover, the deep crimson of a fresh wound. The sort of colour that would turn a child’s colouring book into a thing of horror!

Oddly, Crayola don’t currently have a colour named after blood…

On Midnight Beach, Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick

Midnight Beach as a colour would evoke a deep purple, nearly black but with enough blue in it to clearly not be black yet… basically the colour of the sea in the book cover.

Gingerbread, Helen Oyeyemi

A somewhat self explanatory choice: the colour of a golden baked gingerbread, with a hint of brown to it.

Inferno, Dan Brown

Another somewhat prosaic choice, the colour of intense fire, reds and yellows and orange.

If we rely on the Colour Mix Up Crayon range, we might combine three colours.

This combination is currently called Blazing Bonfire.

Mudlarking, Lara Maiklem

The (somewhat unpleasant) colour of the mud at the edge of the River Thames. A dark thick brown colour redolent of thick oozing wet mud.

When would you ever use that?

So there we have it: ten book titles that could be the name of a crayola crayon colour. A great, fun list and an ideal warm up to next week’s colourful book cover topic!

Upcoming Top Ten Tuesday Topics

April 20: Colorful Book Covers
April 27: Animals from Books (these could be mythical, real, main characters, sidekicks, companions/pets, shifters, etc.) (Submitted by Paige @paigesquared and Jennifer Y. @ Never Too Many to Read)
May 4: My Ten Most Recent Reads (maybe share a one-sentence review to go with?)
May 11: Books with Nature on the Cover (flowers, trees, landscapes, animals, etc.)
May 18: Book Titles That Are Complete Sentences (Submitted by Jessica @ A Cocoon of Books)
May 25: Book Quotes that Fit X Theme (Pick any theme you want, i.e., motivational quotes, romantic dialogues, hunger-inducing quotes, quotes that fill you with hope, quotes on defeating adversity, quotes that present strong emotions, healing, etc. and then select quotes from books that fit that theme.)