A Salman Rushdie anecdote via Christopher Hitchens...
Christopher Hitchens, writing in his memoir Hitch-22, relates a funny bit by Salman Rushdie (who is by all accounts a funny man):
...there came a time when someone arrived late at a dinner party, complaining of having been stuck at an airport with nothing to read but a Robert Ludlum-style novel. This didn’t seem worth pursuing until the complaint was refined somewhat: “I mean it’s not just that the prose is so bloody awful but that the titles are so sodding pretentious… The Bourne Inheritance*,* The Eiger Sanction*, all this portentous piffle.” Again, not a subject to set the table afire, until someone idly said they wondered what a Shakespeare play would be called if it were Ludlum who had the naming of it. At once Salman was engaged and began to smile. “All right, Salman: 'Hamlet' by Ludlum!” At once—and I mean with as much preparation as I have given you—The Elsinore Vacillation. Fluke? Not exactly. Challenged to do the same for 'Macbeth,' he produced The Dunsinane Reforestation with hardly a flourish and barely a beat. After this it was plain sailing through The Kerchief Implication, The Rialto Sanction, and one about Caliban and Prospero that I once knew but now can never remember.*
I particularly love The Elsinore Vacillation. That's brilliant.
Edited: Fixed (I hope) my egregious italicization and titling errors.