Hello r/suggestmeabook, sorry if this isn't quite the right place for this, but I'm looking for a book as a gift. It is a white elephant gift and ideally it would be like a self-help book with a horrible title. This is going to be randomly drawn so I'm not being deliberately mean to anybody, just saddling them with a white elephant. My current top candidate is "How To Not Be Awkward". Bonus points for a bad cover as this will be one of the principle criteria by which the book will be judged. Another route I could take this would be to saddle some unsuspecting person with one of those classics that you never have enough time for like War and Peace or In Search of Lost Time or Middlemarch that will gather dust on a bookshelf which I think would also be in the spirit of a white elephant.
by JimTheSavage
5 Comments
I once came across a book in a $1 bargain bin called “Will He Really Leave Her For Me?” which led to a spirited social media discussion of whether the entire text of the book was the word “No” in really huge font on every page, or just “no” repeated in 12 point font for 150 pages.
I once received a book titled Do-It-Yourself Coffins at a white elephant which was a manual for, yup, building your own coffin. They had tucked a gift card in the back, so once we found that it was finally stolen!
How to lose friends and alienate people. Irving Tressler. The original perfectly titled self help book.
There are always a few bangers in the Abe Books Weird Book Room, like Treat Your Own Neck, How to Raise your IQ by Eating Gifted Children and Embarrassing Moments in German and How to Avoid Them:
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/books/weird/
Mary Roach’s books have funny titles but are genuinely great reads. Bonk, Gulp, Grunt, or Stiff might be contenders.
How about kids’ bodily function books? Everybody Poops. There are series about poop, farts, spit, boogers, pee, etc.