#30daysofexcitingthings

[30-days-of-exciting-stuff-blog]

Day 4 - Litbaits

Since I started out last autumn, I sometimes freak out when I think about the number of working hours I have lost to silly, mostly avoidable things such as freaking interesting Youtube channels, less interesting Youtube material, intense texting, late electricians who have been 20 minutes away from my flat for 2 hours, feelings, hangovers, disturbing hair, ankle sprains (unless there are world-saving issues involved, don’t run with high heels), uncooked lunches (I’m definitely not paying four euros for disgusting sandwiches), buying toothpaste, French politics (presidential campaigns, especially presidential campaigns gone wild, are a bad time to start a PhD), late-night internet digging, and the list goes on and on. Nevertheless, it’s the first time I lose three fucking working hours in a row to a social media campaign.

If a few months for now these few hours turn out to be just the extra time I needed to submit a paper (or, Flying Spaghetti Monster forbids, it, my PhD) on time, blame it on a Dallas bookstore called The Wild Detectives and their genius campaign idea. On National Read a Book day (September 6th, for the record), the library used clickbaits to trick people into reading classic novels. With the slogan “you fell for the bait, now fall for the book”.

I usually hate clickbait. I entirely loathe it. In case you are not familiar with the term, it refers to sensationalist headlines that withhold just enough information for you to desperately want to click on the link; at the expense of the accuracy of the information, or the quality or the content. Clickbait doesn’t care about deceiving you, as long as a page view was generated (yay money). Clickbait doesn’t care about reducing journalism to noisily demanding attention. Clickbait kills kitten. Clickbait definitely isn’t something I expected to make my day at some point in my life.

Clickbait, in a nutshell. Except clickbait doesn’t even want you to keep paying attention. A fraction of a second is enough, as long as you click.

But in The Wild Detectives’ campaign, called Litbait, you don’t get “8 reasons why your relationship may be doomed, the 6th will surprise you” or “This 10-year-old boy made a discovery that will change his life”. You get “Teenage girl tricked boyfriend into killing himself” (Romeo and Juliet), “You’ll never guess what happened to this Kansas teen after this tornado destroys her home” (The Wizard of Oz), “This Italian politician makes Trump look like a saint” (The Prince), “Romanian discovers shocking fact about garlic” (Dracula), and my personal favourite “British guy dies after selfie gone wrong” (The Picture of Dorian Gray). And when you click, you are redirected to the whole. Freaking. Book.

Too bad he died, his mastery of Instagram filters looked impressive as well.

Of course when the campaigned gained slight media attention again, a few days ago, someone posted about it on a beloved forum thread and it rapidly turned into the most amazing game between fellow bookworms: Turn favourite reads into litbaits, and guess the book behind other people’s creations. And just like that, my afternoon was gone. Here are a few of them:

“What this ex-jailbird does when he meets a little girl will make you cry” “She enters a forbidden room. What she finds inside is terrifying” “This man travels to deliver a message of peace, things don’t go as expected” “You’ll never open your cupboard the same way again” “He buys a tablet of chocolate and his life changes forever, find out how !” “This librarian only eats bananas, find out why !” (I love this one) “Her method to get great legs will leave you voiceless”

Legs that make you feel like you’re constantly walking on knives, but still.

Did you get them ? Les Misérables, Bluebeard, the Bible, The Chronicles of Narnia, Charlie and the chocolate factory, Discworld, The Little Mermaid (the pun was totally intended for this one).

If my fellow people from the thread read this: I am amazed at your spirited litbaits and you give me hope for the future of humankind. As long as there will be books and fun people around, life will never get boring. Long live litbaits.

And also: No music (re)discovered today, so I’m kind of cheating here as I’ve been listening to this song quite often for a few months already. But I feel that my upcoming trip to Dublin is having a significant influence on me, because I find myself fangirling over Flogging Molly even more than usual. (Drunken Lullabies isn’t their only song) (Even though it’s eargasm material as well)