Some Friday Fun - Less Interesting Books

Friday is my favorite day of the week! It's ripe with anticipation for the weekend ahead. Somehow the workload in my office feels a little more manageable on Fridays. And sometimes it's even pay day!

So today, I thought we could have a little bit of fun with book titles--actually, less interesting book titles. Maybe like thousands of others, you caught the popular topic on twitter several days ago called Less Interesting Books. The idea behind it was simple: Take a popular book title and tweak it just enough to make the book a whole lot less interesting.

For example, The Great Gatsby becomes The So-So Gatsby. You can't wait to read the first. The second is ... well ... so-so. Here are some of my very favorites that were flying along twitter. Wish I'd come up with some of them!

1. Of Mice
2. Harry Potter and the Order of Takeout
3. Bored of the Flies
4. A Series of Not Too Shabby Events
5. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce
6. Love in the Time of Chicken Pox
7. To Somewhat Offend a Mockingbird
8. Minor Discomfort and Casual Resentment in Las Vegas
9. The Grapes of Math
10. There’s Waldo
11. Where the Wild Things Were
12. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Artist Formerly Known as Prince
13. The Call of the Skittish
14. The Second to the Last of the Mohicans
15. Farenheit 72 - the thermostat wars in offices across the country

In all seriousness, all the laughs got me thinking about the importance of book titles. What if Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald had called his book simply Gatsby or Mark Twain had called his The Story of Huckleberry Finn? Titles have a power to draw readers, engage them from the get-go, and give them a reason to keep reading.

Take, for example, The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. The title might not make readers bat an eye in modern book culture, but when this book debuted in the 1950s, it probably turned a few heads. When I was 8 and reading it for the first time, you can bet that I was way more fascinated in discovering who the witch was than I was interested in reading a book about blue dolphins. Speare's classic is still my all-time favorite book.

Titles tell a story of their own and are much more important than just identifying the story within. Now it's your turn to share! What book titles do you love? Are there any that you felt were misleading or not strong enough for the great book between the covers? What Less Interesting Book titles have you come up with?