Booksellers' blogs abound with tales of customers who wander into their shops looking for a book with only the vaguest idea of what it's called or who wrote it – sometimes not even that. "Now it is up to the bookseller to help them remember," says the Happy Nappy Bookseller, blogging from Atlanta. "In order to do this we must call upon detective-like skills. Detectives use these techniques with witnesses to extract more information – or at least those I've seen on television."

Even George Orwell, in his essay Bookshop Memories (1963), opined that the book trade was filled with customers "of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop", such as the "dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn't remember the title or the author's name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover."

Much of this perennial problem is to do with the rather confusing nature in which many books are titled by their authors, in ways that tell you nothing of what's actually inside. The humorist David Sedaris has said that his editors have previously accused him of giving his books titles that were "wilfully obtuse".

We can give thanks, then, for the efforts of Brooklyn-based comedian, writer and performer Dan Wilbur, who is on a mission to retitle books in a Ronseal-style "does exactly what it says on the tin". On his website betterbooktitles.com, Wilbur posts up a retitled book – sometimes with new covers of his own design – every weekday, giving over Friday to suggestions from his readers.

His mission statement reads: "This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!"

Browsing through the archive is a diverting way to kill some time, with more than 200 retitled books. Not all are safe for work, mind you, but many are pithy and to the point. F Scott Fitzgerald's classic The Great Gatsby becomes, in Wilbur's hands, simply: Drink Responsibly. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is renamed White People Ruin Everything. And I do like how Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach can be easily summed up as It's Okay If Giant Fruit Kills Your Aunts So Long As They Were Bitches.

Who can't empathise with Wuthering Heights retitled: My Teacher Ruined This? Would more people study classics if Plato's Symposium was really called Horny Drunk Guys Invent Philosophy? And is Wilbur risking a fantasy fatwah by renaming George RR Martin's Game of Thrones as Shakespeare Minus the Good Writing?

Perhaps Orwell and his more modern bookselling peers might be happier with more literal literary labels, but is a cryptic title necessarily a bad thing? And if you had to retitle a favourite (or hated, come to that) book, what would it become?