Better Book Titles

“I wish this book had come out years ago, so that I could have avoided going to college and skipped straight to the bright and shiny life of a stand-up comedian. My eyes have been opened. My mind has been closed.”

-Kumail Nanjiani, comedian.

“As an author as well as the daughter of a librarian, this book ought to enrage me. However, it actually gives me a throbbing ladyboner. This book has everything I want in my reading experience: hilarity, intelligence, swear words, Photoshop, and occasional doses of homoerotica. It made me feel better about pretending to be an avid reader, and it’s helping me maintain my status as a faux-intellectual. Thanks, Dan!”

-Sara Benincasa, author of Agorafabulous! Dispatches from My Bedroom.

“God bless Dan Wilbur and his noble crusade to free us from the tyranny of literacy. Finally, after all these years, we can say it: Suck it, Johannes Gutenberg!”

-Christian Finnegan, comedian.

Trailers:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Other Writing by Dan about books:

Huffington Post: 10 Books That Taught Me Reading Books is Bullshit

Powell’s Blog: How Rude Customers See Indie Bookstores

Powell’s Blog: A Missing Page from My Book

Powell’s Blog: YELP Reviews are the new novels

What You’ll find in the Book:

The Last Stupid Book You’ll Ever Need to Read

Don’t want to slog through lengthy old books like A Tale of Two Cities or The Giving Tree? Sick of being judged by your avid-reader “friends” who talk about books you’ve never heard of? Want to sound smarter without the strain of actually bettering yourself? Never fear. In How Not to Read, you’ll find techniques to fake your way through literature so you never have to read another book—ever!

Inside, you’ll find:

• Tips for getting through anything you have to read by reading faster: Just read every third word. (One Hundred Years of Solitude becomes “Many as the Colonel was, that when him ice.” Wow! It’s like a Gertrude Stein poem only more comprehensible!)

• Entire genres summed up in a single page: Historical fiction becomes “Guess who else had sex: Hitler!”

• Literary insults to make yourself seem smarter: “The only thing sadder than you is a Joycean epiphany!” “You’re as weak as a passive sentence written in negative form. And probably not considered by anyone to be worth more than an adverb.”

It’s time to stop fearing those people who keep bringing up Ayn Rand. How Not to Read is here to liberate the world from ever needing to read a book again.

Read an Excerpt