Accidental Blogger

Via Abhi at Sepia Mutiny, I came across this article in the New York Times. It is funny and refreshing to  read an essay in which the choice of books (rather than other trendy habits), figures as the deal maker (or breaker) in a budding romance. Although I didn’t choose my own mate based solely on our mutual reading habits, that there was at least a 75% overlap in our tastes, made conversations easy and lively. We were both "voracious" readers then and read books on a wide range of subjects.  Yes, we did read Ayn Rand around the age of 18 or 19 and quite enjoyed her writings. (That opinion has been drastically revised since then.)  When we first met, my husband had the more high brow literary outlook and he introduced me to many of my favorite authors in English. I had a leg up on him as a bi-lingual reader equally at home in Bengali and English; he can read comfortably only in English. I am still a book worm and my husband no longer reads anything except scientific papers and that too mostly on the web. But our conversations haven’t flagged. When I read a good book, I often tell him its gist or quote from interesting passages and he listens with interest. The funny thing is that he doesn’t feel compelled to pick up the book and read.

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

Interesting. Are women bigger literary snobs than men who are looking for more earthly pleasures in a relationship? Probably.