Blunt advice tome wins oddest book title award

Good advice? Maybe. Oddest book title of 2007 — that's official.

If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs has won the Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year, The Bookseller magazine announced in London on Friday.

Big Boom, the apparently pseudonymous author, calls it a "self-help book, written by a man for the benefit of women."

It's a book, he writes, that is "raw, honest and about you," distilling "the sweat off my back, the wrinkles in my forehead from anger and thinking all the time."

The title triumphed in a public vote over runner-up, I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen and the third-place finisher, Cheese Problems Solved.

"The winner, If You Want Closure, makes redundant an entire genre of self-help tomes," said Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller.

"So effective is the title that you don't even need to read the book itself."

The title joins a pantheon of past winners, including Weeds in a Changing World (1999), The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (2003); Bombproof Your Horse (2004); and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (2006).