sql query to filter out prepositions ie. 'the, a ...'

I'm trying to write a query that does a search on the first letter in a column. That part is ok, ie:

select book_title
from books
where UPPER(substr(book_title,1,1)) = 'A';

But some book titles might be 'The Lord of the Rings' or 'A Nightmare...', so I'd only want the query to do the search on the actual name. I would have a reasonably short list of those prepositions I'd want to trim off. Received on Mon Mar 24 2003 - 12:09:19 CST