Saturday, January 25, 2014

One Weird Trick to Mess With Book Titles



Lately, half the internet is using clickbait Upworthy-style post titles, and the other half is making fun of them. A branch of that pastime is to take a classic book and change the title into this style of headline. The pictures here are from the post 16 #BuzzfeedBooks You Have To Read Before You Die (The hashtag is a resurrection of a somewhat different meme that went around a couple of years ago.)

Another list that does the same thing, Read Me! Please!: Book Titles Rewritten to Get More Clicks, actually gives more of the content away than a real clickbait title would. I personally think a post title should give you some idea of what you're about to read, because it's maddening to leave the website you're on to find something you're not interested in.

Metafilter posted links to the two lists, and Mefites added more book titles.
Gilgamesh befriended this homeless man. What happened next was epic.

And You Thought Your Period Was Bad: The Shocking Tale Of A Small-Town Prom Gone Wrong

What This Man Did To Get Home Will Astonish You!

Page 40 Will Completely Change the Way You Think About Green Eggs and Ham

They came up with so many, that divabat made a spreadsheet. Try to guess the real book from the clickbait title before you look at column C. Have fun!

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