"The story of my life." "The true confessions of..." "The girl that..." If someone names a book something like one of those, I judge them for their painful cliches. "Rise like a pheonix" "Throw your hands in air, wave 'em like you just don't care." "Story of my life." Song lyrics I hate. "Pun not intended." "Pun intended." I hate this because it's drawing attention to a pun awkwardly. Either a pun is clever enough to be noticed, or it's vague enough to be ignored. Let the pun prove how clever you are, don't beg for people's attention.
Any book that has a colon and a subtitle in it is likely to be a political hack piece (and I'm not assigning this to the Left or the Right) these days, written for a quick buck. Damn pilots' union!
A couple of years ago I was in a small plane in Nepal flying from Kathmandu to a rural airport in the north east mountains. The cockpit was closed from us, but I was sitting right behind it. I watched as the ground came closer and closer until we suddenly hit clouds and I heard the audible warning from the cockpit: "Pull up, terrain. Pull up, terrain." We were in clouds! The warning kept going, and through breaks in the cloud I could see glimpses of trees right below us with the warning still going and he doesn't pull up. My palms are sweaty and I'm trying to look calm while expecting us to hit a mountain at any moment. Then the ground just drops away suddenly as we break the clouds. It scared the fucking life out of me. Fun fact: I was filming the whole time and have it on video. The engine noise was very loud but you can just hear the warning. Fun fact 2: That very same plane was the one that fatally crashed while landing at Lukla a year six months later. So for me it's Pull up, terrain.