You’ve heard that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but what about judging books by their titles? Despite the perennial admonitions from good-natured and tolerant book-lovers, I daresay we all do it all the time: take on...

In a culture where we spend childhood reading The Baby-sitters Club, high school and college English classes pressing through the classic novels our teachers foist on us, and adulthood keeping current with the Gone Girls of the...