Post for a silly day: book titles, updated

When you log into the Typepad dashboard now, you get to see all kinds of things, including a question of the day. Today's is: if you met yourself as a teenager now, what three things would you tell yourself?
I'll take a raincheck on that, but on a day when despite my best intentions not to mention the DB or TLS words, the internet and blogosphere is overwhelmed by Dan Brown -- Waterstones and the Bookseller read and live-Twittered The Lost Symbol overnight and the Guardian (clearly not as dedicated in the line of duty) started the same exercise this morning -- I feel like writing something silly.

So here is a post via Boing Boing which I think is a better challenge than the one posed by Typepad's question of the day. It is "if literary classics had been retitled", or as the source post at Your monkey called more aptly puts it: "Book titles, if they were written today". An example is:

Then: The Wealth of Nations
Now:  Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

As is so often the case, the best examples are in the comments to both posts. A few favourites:

Then: Dante's Inferno.
Now: Dante's Descent into Dummy Loan Felonies —With a Detour for Minimum Security Prison— and Amazing Redemption as an "Ethical Financial Advisor"

Then: The Art of War
Now: 13 Chapters of Highly Effective Warfare Techniques (Illustrated)

Here's two with Dan Brown themes:

Then: The Double Helix
Now: The Stuff of Life: The Hunt For the Code Behind Every Living Thing

Then: The Iliad
Now: The Trojan Code

OK - that's enough DB -- ed.

Then: Moby Dick
Now: Sea Trek 2: The Wrath of Ahab

Then: The Bible
Now: The Dangerous Book for Adults. Lessons on Life, Love, War and Sin. Includes dream interpretation and The Bible II - revised edition with all 4 gospels.

Then : The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Now: The Jungle Book by Bernie Madoff/Ben Bernanke

And finally....

CHARLES J. DICKENS
The Twist Progression

CHARLES J. DICKENS
The Jarndyce Inheritance
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE TWIST PROGRESSION

CHARLES J. DICKENS
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
The Havisham Agenda

Feel free to add your own, here or at your own blog (or both!).

Comments

[Bernadette]

I like that one for The Bible...although I think maybe it would be more like a Paul McKenna self-help tome...perhaps... I CAN MAKE YOU HOLY with 30 days free membership of the Paul McKenna Holyness club. Includes FREE sin removing CD.

I got a chuckle out of my DB day. There was a TV reporter standing outside the big chain book store near my office as I went to work (around 7:30) doing a live cross to a morning news show talking about the huge excitement and anticipation of the day...except there was only one person standing in the "queue" (and I think that was a homeless person they paid to stand there).

[Rob]

Then: The Da Vinci Code
Now: Peter and Jane for Illerate Adults

[Norm]

Then: The House of the Seven Gables
Now: Improve your Property, and make money

Then: The Three Musketeers
Now: Blair, Brown and Mandelson, How We Ruined a Country

Then: Hard Times
Now: Britain in the 2010s, an economic prediction

[Martin Edwards]

Excellent - especially Moby Dick!

[Michael Walters]

I particularly liked Dickens in the style of Ludlum. It reminds me of the story of (if I recall correctly) Martin Amis and Julian Barnes trying to come up with Ludlumesque re-titlings of Shakespeare, which Amis won with 'Hamlet' retitled as 'The Elsinore Vacillation'.

[Steve Jensen]

Then: Jane Eyre

Now: The Little Girl they Locked in the Red Room (and possibly Intended to Swap for a Packet of Cigarettes).

[Steve Jensen]

Then: 1984

Now: 2090