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Drawing the Wrong Lessons – Bad Book Review Clickbait
Per some rather head-smackingly daft articles @titustechera has been bringing to my attention on Facebook (I’ll not link to them so as to spare the guilty), let’s have a game. The goal here is to come up with one or two sentence article titles on life lessons you can draw from classic or famous books or stories, but with a catch. You see, you must demonstrate that while your article title does indeed convey that the you may have read the story in question, you obviously did not understand it, and are instead trying to wring out whatever preconceived life lessons you think the story should have been about. Some starters are:
- A Christmas Carol: How hard work, thrift, and personal sacrifice allow generous philanthropy in old age.
- Wuthering Heights: How to stay true to yourself.
- Game of Thrones: How your siblings can help you get ahead in life.
- McTeague: How occupational licensing laws ruin lives.
- The Great Gatsby: The evolution of automotive safety.
- Tom Sawyer: How to leverage networking your friends to distribute workloads more evenly.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: When to bring out your inner wolf to achieve success.
Have fun with this, and show no mercy to the ignorant.
Published in Humor
Romeo & Juliet: Can’t we all just get along? (hat tip: Rodney King)
Touring France with Henry V.
Dune: A lesson in water conservation and xeriscaping.
King Lear and his heartwarming lessons on the joys of raising daughters.
The Three Musketeers. A king’s band of mercenary horsemen, whose very name identifies them with gun use, oppose the only holy man in the entire story.
The War of the Worlds: Sometimes when a society’s first response to being incinerated is wholly negative, when we don’t immediately spend what it takes to transfer resources, prestige and societal power to our artists and our most creative free thinkers, our interplanetary diplomacy will suffer, other planets get angry and bad outcomes could result.
Fail Safe: It’s extremely important to inspect vital electrical components on a regular basis and replace if needed.
Les Miserables: the Parisian sewer system is a marvel of the modern world.
1984: Free flat screen TV in every room is great, but it comes with a price: a growing synthesis of police interrogation techniques and urban pest control.
Billy Budd: It’s okay to punch a Nazi.
Also a Tale of Two Cities
Smokey and the Bandit — With the right marketing even Coors sounds good.
The Purloined Letter – Always keep your room clean in case of visitors.
My Side of the Mountain — A treatise on how much better society would be if all the whiny know-it-all kids got themselves lost in the wilderness.
A Coat of Varnish — Don’t let others define you, win in life by believing in yourself.
Updated,with new illustrations, as Who Moved My Trough?
The Lord of the Rings: How Gollum saved Middle-earth with the help of some hobbits
Gollum and Frodo star in a fantasy setting of the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid story.
The Brothers Karamazov — “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”
”That was no lady; that was Grushenka.”
Leaving Las Vegas (the novel by John O’Brien, although for the purposes of this example, the film will do as well): In which the redemptive power of unconditional love and co-dependency saves two lost souls.
(That may actually have been the intended message of the thing. I think it probably was. But it’s perverse.)
Actually, it’s a horrible story and, a terribly sad case. John O’Brien died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound a few weeks after signing away the rights of the book to the film company.
Alternate Headline: You can run away from your problems!
A Heart of Darkness: A parable on the importance of proper planning for your corporate retreat.
The Odyssey: A sight seeing tour of the Mediterranean.
Dune: The dangers of inbreeding.
Pride and Prejudice: Three weddings and no funeral.
Or two guys fight over a ring.
Pride and Prejudice — Is picking a house really just about “location, location, location”? Clever shopper Elizabeth shows that 10,000 a year is an underappreciated feature.
Njal’s Saga: The hardship of being an Viking lawyer.
Jurassic Park: Bringing dinosaurs back from extinction worked.
Speaking of which:
The English Patient: It’s okay to spy for the Nazis if you really, really, love someone.
Gangs of New York – People had good reasons to discriminate against the Irish.
Lucifer’s Hammer By Larry Niven – A fictionalized memoir of a Trump White House Aide…
“Be all that you can be, including a cannibal.”
The Brothers Karamazov — Why it’s okay to distrust and perhaps even hate family.
A Tale of Two Cities — If you’ve go to be someone’s doppelganger, make sure you’re the wealthy one with lots of potential. Don’t be the drunk loser.
The Man in the Iron Mask –the bolder the plan, the bigger the fail.
Perelandra– sometimes you just gotta kick some a**
The Last of the Mohicans- why the French will never understand America.